I 



THINGS NEW AND OLD 



BY 



ROBERT COLLYER 



MINISTER OF THE CHURCH OF THE MESSIAH, NEW YORK 



E. 



ftfe 8 1393 

NEWVORK 
P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 

31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 
1893 



THE LIBRARY 

OF CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON 



Copyright 
E. P. Button & Co. 
1893 



Press of J. J. Little & Co. 
Astor Place, New York 



©ebicafi'on 

TO THE MEMORY OF THE DEAR WIFE AND MOTHER 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The Overplus of Blossom 7 

The Way where the Light dwelleth 23 

Marthas and Marys 38 

The Parable of the Reserves 53 

Instantaneous Photographs 68 

The Low-lying Lights 82 

The City lieth Four-square 95 

Antipas, my Faithful Martyr no 

The Great Divine Sermon 127 

Why Simon Peter went a-fishing 141 

John the Beloved 154 

Seeing God Afterward 167 

The Joy in Harvest 181 

The Rich and the Poor 195 



i 



THE OVERPLUS OF BLOSSOM. 



"I see men as trees." — Mark viii. 24. 

We had a cherry-tree once, in our bit of garden out 
West, which broke out into a wonderful splendor in the 
spring, and sent its fragrance floating through my study 
window ; but, as I would watch it day by day, I had to 
remember how it had done this before with no great 
success in the way of cherries, and then I began to 
muse over what one might call the overplus of blossom. 

I had been away to the South, also, while as yet there 
were but few signs of spring in the North, and had found 
this glory haunting the woods and wild pastures and 
crowning the farms with its beauty ; and from this time 
I had thought of the blossoms sweeping slowly north- 
ward until they came to my own window, and covering 
the land as with a mantle woven of sweetness and light, 
while, after they had passed our line, I could still see 
them sweeping northward, and knew they would never 
halt until they set one lonely bush afire a dear friend of 
mine found blooming in the hither edges of the arctic 
circle, as the bush bloomed for Moses in Midian. And 
then, at last, I knew that, like a great tide, this blossom- 
ing would toss its spray over into the lands of utter and 
hopeless sterility, and touch the moss with specks of 
blossom as beautiful to those who have the eye to see 



8 



The Overplus of Blossom 



them as the crowned splendor of the peaches and the 
apples in the rich, warm lands. 

Then my musing blended with old memories, and I 
found myself wondering whether hosts of children 
would not fall into the trouble I struck in my own 
childhood, about the one tree we had which broke out 
every spring into these extravagant promises of the 
fruit dear to boys, whose very notions of heaven seem 
to abide as yet in this matchless liking for what they 
seem to have liked best in Eden. I wondered whether 
such boys would not get their first back-stroke, as I did, 
through their appetite and expectation, and as a great 
many children do of riper years. That luckless tree 
never did keep the promise in the summer it had made 
to me in the spring. 

I remember one year especially, after an almost match- 
less outburst of blossom, how there was the meanest 
yield of fruit I could remember in my tiny tale of the 
years ; and it was then I said, in some misty way com- 
mon enough to children who are trying to true the 
world about them to the world within : God cannot 
do as he will, then, or else he changes his mind. He 
certainly set out to give us all the plums we wanted 
this year. Now, what does he mean by sending the 
blossoms and then keeping back the fruit } Would it 
not be better to do as I would do if I were in his place, 
— make every blossom stand for a plum, and so save, 
himself and save us also all this trouble.'^" 

After that haggard year I think it was never quite so 
bad again. There was always a fair show of fruit ; and, 
then, I was getting somewhat used to the frustration. 
Still, I never could make September quite keep terms 



The Overplus of Blossom 9 

with May, — better and worse, but never up to the prom- 
ises. And so, as I bore the trouble of that tree toward 
my manhood, and found I had to long for full and plenty 
of other fruit I must not have, I began to wonder 
whether it was not of the very exuberance of God's 
blessing that this overplus of beauty and fragrance 
comes to us, and whether on the Tree of Life also there 
may not be a blooming which never comes to anything 
but the bloom, and yet this in itself may be so good 
and true that, when we touch the heart of the mystery, 
we shall neither say, God has broken his promise to 
us,'' nor that we have lost our chance to make this 
promise good. And as in the spring-time on the trees 
all about us there are ten blossoms that will bloom 
through their brief day and then just shower down in 
the wind to one which will set and ripen into good fruit, 
so on the tree of my life may there not be ten beautiful 
aspirations to one good fruition } and yet may not these 
aspirations themselves be very sweet and good in their 
own way and be counted as the blossoms are in the 
glory of the year } 

Surely, it must be true that they come as the blos- 
soms come out of the overplus of the divine grace and 
of our own abounding life, not to dishearten us and lead 
us to doubt, but rather to believe in this good Provi- 
dence as insuring us a grand good margin ; to believe 
that God feels toward us as we feel toward our children, 
when we are good enough and wise enough to be con- 
tent with such simple and scant fruition as they can 
attain to, never reckoning with them over-sharply as to 
what has become of their wealth of good intentions, but 
listening still with a large and tender interest to the 



10 



The Overplus of Blossom 



endless story of what they mean to do, and glad to hear 
about it all because the aspiration is very beautiful to 
us and very good, even when we know all the time that 
they will forget ten of these intentions where they will 
carry one out clear to the end and make it bring forth 
good fruit. 

"Dear hearts," we say, as we listen to them, *'it is 
all right. The blossom itself is fruit in the long fair year 
of God ; and what a wealth of it you have, to be sure. 
Why, you can intend and aspire enough in ten minutes 
to ruin you, root and branch, if you should try to make 
all your intentions and aspirations ripen into good fruit 
in the seventy years we have for our human span." 
And so I think it is a good thing for us all, now and 
then, to turn to this quieter and more restful thought 
of what we can do within the lines of the truest life, 
compared with what we can aspire to do, and intend to 
do, and how we can no more expect or afford to turn 
the whole wealth of these aspirations into equally noble 
actions than the trees can afford to make the promise 
of the spring good to the last blossom in the fruit they 
will give us in the fall. 

Margaret Fuller preserves a letter, written, as I 
judge, by a woman, who says: " I went this morning 
to hear Dr. Channing, and came away sadly tired listen- 
ing to one of his great sermons. He set us up so high, 
and expected so much from us as the consequence of 
his doctrine, that, when I got home, I was fain to take 
my New Testament and read where Jesus says, ' Ye are 
more than many sparrows ' ; and the blessed old Word 
rested me and did me a sight of good, because it was 
not so exalting and flattering." And I think I can 
understand that feeling. 



The Overplus of Blossom 



II 



The soul cannot live forever in the white light of her 
own dignity and glory, any more than the sweet wood- 
violets can live forever in the sun. And so, while it is 
all true about the dignity of our human nature, and 
true, also, that no man can ever tell the whole worth of 
what is waiting in the waiting heavens as the fruit of 
God's sending and of our own human striving, still 
that tender glance the woman got through the heart of 
Christ is very restful and gracious, when we try to 
measure the distance between the aspiration and the 
attainment, — "Ye are more than many sparrows." 
And so you must not be over-troubled, if, while you 
are quite aware of the wider vision and stronger pin- 
ions, you can neither soar so high nor fly so far as 
your eager hearts would have you. Ye are the 
branches, and I am the Vine. So bear what fruit you 
can, then, this year, without damaging the stock for the 
next. 

So I say believe in the trees if you cannot quite 
believe in yourselves, and note their happy lesson. 
The blossoms in themselves are good. They mean ten 
times more than they do ; but what beauty and fra- 
grance still abide in their meaning ! How it floats 
over the homes of men as a delicate aroma nothing 
can slay except the ugly enormity of our overcrowded 
tenements ! So we can thank God for the blossoming 
in our nature of beautiful and good intentions, which 
will be sure to fail, as we are taught to think of faiUng, 
and for the good fruit, which will be sure to ripen 
from some of them if we do the best we may. 

I. Because this is the first thing to be sure about: 
that there must be in us all this plus of the promise over 



12 



The Overplus of Blossom 



the fruition if there is to be any great worth in us be- 
sides, and that, in our childhood especially, it may be 
just this, and very little more, when we are left to live 
our life as God would have us live it, and when those 
who have the care of us and love us for ourselves are 
wise to see how this is about all they can expect from 
us, exactly as a good pomologist neither looks for nor 
wishes for fruit from the mere sapling, because he 
knows how this would fatally injure the tree. So he 
is quite content, you notice, to see the small things 
stand there and shake down their blossoms into the 
grass time and again, and to wait for the fruit by and 
by. 

The strength, he will tell you, is gathering in the 
roots and the stock, which will come in time to a noble 
fruitage and repay him for all his waiting. And so it 
is a sad sight to me to see fathers and mothers who 
have no such wisdom for their children as these wise 
men have for the saplings, and cannot be content to 
let the child be a child, and nothing more, but must 
still burden the tender plant with demands which 
belong to the strong and able tree. 

Fathers and mothers who are not content to keep 
the saplings clean from the evil things which burrow 
around the roots or stab the bole, and to see that the 
soil is good from which they draw their strength and 
nurture, keep them straight and true, and then let 
the sun shine on them, and the sweet dews of their 
childhood refresh them, — who cannot be content, I 
say, with all this, and the blossoming into the bargain, 
but must still be urging them on to fruitful action, 
while as yet the choicest gift of God to them is this 
simple aspiration. 



The Overplus of Blossom 



13 



Nothing should be expected from these feeble folk 
save what is perfectly natural (as I think, who have 
had many children) and fitting for their childhood ; 
and to imagine that they can never begin too soon to 
assume the cares and burdens of our life, if we can 
prevent it, is a terrible mistake. ' The Scriptures say, 
''It is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth''; 
but I would make the yoke easy on the youth God 
intrusts to me, while on the child it should lie light as 
the white blossoms on the spray. The best fruitage 
in children of a tender age is simply to bloom, and to 
cherish their budding aspirations with the most royal 
disregard as to what may become of them. 

The heaven of our earliest life is white with these 
blossoms, which are of no use except to sweeten and 
make more beautiful the way on which we go dream- 
ing in our youth. It is then that the giants are for- 
ever slain as they are never slain : and the little hand 
tingles and aches to get at the wolf, and the small slip- 
per finds the fitting foot, and the cat is the best treas- 
ure on the ship, what time the bells have been chiming 
over Highgate Hill, and the children wander forever 
through the woods so sweetly forlorn until the bird 
whose breast became red trying to pluck the thorns 
from the brow of the blessed Christ comes through the 
green archways and covers them with leaves. 

Leave them to their dreams, I say ! Such things 
are the child's Bible. Leave them to their dreams ! 
These are the blossoms on a tree yielding fruit after 
its kind, whose seed is in itself. God has made them 
as they are, in his eternal goodness, as he makes the 
sapling simply to bloom until the years bring forth 



1 Jie Overplus of Blossom 



strength for bearing. Leave them their childhood 
sweet and free. 

" They mingle with our life's ethereal part, 
Sweetening and gathering sweetness evermore, 
By beauty's franchise disenthralled of time." 

II. And, once more, when we grow to that estate in 
which it is to be expected we shall attain to something 
more than the tree which blossoms, but bears no fruit at 
all, you may notice how there is still in many natures, 
and very often in the finest, a splendid overplus of 
aspiration and intention which can never be more than 
as the overplus of blossom on the trees. I suppose, 
indeed, that now, when the elder men among us have 
learned some pregnant lessons on this matter, we can 
still tell of mornings when w^e would wake up feeling 
so full of life that we were able to lay out a day's w^crk 
ample enough to lead us to wonder, as the evening 
shadows fell, how we could have done so little when 
we meant to do so much, and were ready . to cry with 
the old Roman, I have lost a day ! " 

It is the eternal distinction nature draws between the 
lusty blossoming and the moderate fruitage, set to the 
simplest experience and brought w^ithin a morning and 
an evening. But, then, it may be we can see, if we will, 
now how the overplus of purpose had still this fine 
quality in it, after all, that we should neither have done 
so much, nor have done that much so wxl], had we not 
risen and gone forth with this fine ambition to be doing 
boiling in our blood ; and it was to the afternoon, wdien 
we began to feel the pull of the hard day, what the 
early rains are to the drought which lasts from mid- 



The Overplus of Blossom 



June very often to September, filling all the springs, so 
that every root gets its share, and the mills are turned 
by the overplus in the woods and the mountains. 

So I imagine it is very seldom possible for those of 
a hopeful and aspiring nature to make the aspiration 
and hope of their youth come even with the fruitage of 
their manhood or womanhood, and least of all in those 
things which seem quite essential to the fulfilling of 
their life. Poor Haydon, the painter, I notice, breaks 
out in his youth into one great cloud of blossoming, 
when he dreamed he would storm the world by his 
genius and usher in the new great day of art. But, 
then, the trouble is this : that the dream of his youth 
becomes the misery and blight of his age, simply be- 
cause he never could, or never would, understand this 
open secret of the overplus of blossom. He did bear 
some good fruit; and, if he could have said, Thank 
God for that : it is the best I can do, and I am con- 
tent," he might have been a far happier man than he 
was, and waited for the angels to come and bear him 
away instead of rushing out of life unbidden and be- 
fore his time. 

And so there are men and women everywhere who, 
when the strong tide smites them, catch this crown of 
splendid aspirations and wear it with a great, deep 
joy. They will write books the world must read, they 
will create things for which the world will go down on 
its knees, almost, to thank them, or take a first place 
in their profession and hold it against all odds, or make 
themselves seen and heard from an eminence no man 
may question, or make a fortune no disaster can pluck 
out of their hands. It is all very good to dream such 



i6 



The Ove7'pliLS of B loss 0771 



dreams, — and they may be of a true worth in pushing us 
on, — only this is the trouble : that I cannot take this 
truth into my heart, it may be, of ten blossoms to one 
good apple ; and so all my later life is touched with dis- 
appointment. 

For I certainly have known men whose lives were 
made miserable by their failure to remember this lesson 
of the trees. They began their life as if they were quite 
sure that all they had to do was to just march on and 
storm the world, — men whose lives blossomed in the 
early days into the loveliest hopes and aspirations, but 
who found, when their spring was over, that much of 
this had come to naught ; and then they could not feel 
that it was a divine thing at all that had befallen them. 
They imagined a globe would set in every cup and 
grow and ripen, and so the day came when the sweet- 
ness and light of their life left them ; nor did they care 
that even what fruit they had on the tree should find 
the sun, and ripen the best it might, there seemed to 
be so little of it, and it looked so mean against the 
background of their early visions. And so a blight 
came on their whole career, and that was sour which 
might have been so sweet and good if they had but 
known this secret of the overplus of blossom. 

III. We may see once more how this lapse between 
the blossom and the fruit may enter into the whole 
range of our life, to help us if we will but consider its 
law, or to hurt us beyond all measure if we will still 
insist on a fruit for every blossom. 

The young man leaves his home in the spring-tide 
of his life, and feels sure that, if he does his best, he 
will win a good place and do whatever he hungers and 



The Ovei'pliis of Blossom 



17 



thirsts to do, to find at the end of tv/enty or thirty 
years that he is not at all the man he should have 
been if the fruitage had been equal to the blossom ; and, 
then, he is in danger of growing bitter and doubtful, 
not about himself alone, but about the good providence 
of God, which, as he thinks, should have helped him to 
make his aspiration come true, or else have left him 
more moderately endowed with aspirations. 

Now I would like to get hold of that man, and ask 
him to note what Nature has been doing in the woods 
and orchards this year, and then tell him it was a 
splendid thing to have the aspiration, and that was 
good fruit, also, of its kind ; for if he has been true at 
all to the inner impulse which crowned his youth with 
this fair crown, he has done far better than the man 
who did not aspire and did not care. There is always 
some good fruit, soon or late, from the blossoming in 
everyone of us, — just as much as we could carry, per- 
haps, if we could only fathom the whole secret. And 
so we should no more doubt God's providence because 
so much of the promise has fallen dead about us than 
we doubt Nature's providence as she snows down her 
overplus of blossom about the roots of the trees. 

This is the secret, again, of a true content in the life 
of the heart and the home. For not over many men 
and women, I suppose, have found that their wedded 
life answered completely to the dreams of their court- 
ship ; but in all the world you will not find a gracious 
and true-hearted man or woman who will not thank 
God for that overplus of blossom which came with the 
sweet, brave days, and was so divine while it lasted, or 
who will now enter a complaint against Heaven be- 



i8 



The Ovcrphis of Blossom 



cause May does not quite match with October. That 
fine glamour, if I may touch m.y figure again, is like 
great early rains : if they treasure it in their hearts 
for what it is worth and what it means, it may tide 
them over many a dry and dusty day, and still keep 
terms with them that a fair fruitage shall not be 
wanting when they come to the ingathering of the 
years. 

If my experience is to be of any use, I think a 
thunder-storm even can do no great harm to this blos- 
soming if it wax not too savage and relentless. I have 
known such storms clear the atmosphere under the 
roof about as sweetly as they do above it; and, when 
I hear of people who have lived together a great 
many years and never had the least difference, I won- 
der whether they have not had rather too much indif- 
ference for a true man and wife, and am ready to say 
with Paley, when he heard of such a pair, It may have 
been verra bonny, but it must have been a little 
stupid." God help those who cannot let the fair, sweet 
bloom go for what it was worth, but must fret their life 
out over the vanished glory, or poison each othp>^^ex- 
istence with mutual regret because they cannot live to 
the end of their days in the sweetness and fragrance of 
the spring. 

It is the lesson we have to learn once more through 
our saddest and most painful experiences. 

Nothing can be more natural and beautiful than that 
the longing we feel touching the fair blossoming of our 
children should come to its full fruition, and yet for 
the most of us this can never be. The bloom fades 
and falls on which we have set our hearts, that one 



The Overplus of Blossom 



19 



peerless blossom, as it always seems, we loved best, 
because it was so beautiful and caught the light so 
winsomely. The trouble of its falling shakes the soul 
to its centre, and we often sorrow more for those that 
have gone than we rejoice for those that abide and 
fulfil the promises of the spring. It is a long day 
then, before we can thank God for their blooming that 
have faded, and say, he did indeed give us the blos- 
soms. They could not stay, but they did come, made 
May for us in their coming, and left the fragrance 
of May forever in our life. 

Let the trees be my teachers, if I will be taught in 
no diviner way, and Nature tell me of God's grace if I 
will not hear the still, small voice. I stood one morn- 
ing, long ago, by Niagara, in the latter spring, watching 
the play of the great emerald on the heart of the greater 
falls as the sun smote it here and there, and the rain- 
bow bent over the eternal white mist. It was a still 
morning; and, as I stood there, alone, I was aware of 
an exquisite fragrance stealing across the cataracts I 
had never noticed in any visit before ; and, wondering 
how this should be, I saw that over in Canada the trees 
were still all abloom, apple-trees in the orchards and 
blossoms on the wild bushes clinging to the cliffs, all 
white and crimson and gleaming through the greenery, 
and then I knew it was the brave overplus of blossom 
which was sending its fragrance on the wings of the 
soft June morning across the great chasm. 

And so I have thought of these blossoms . which 
bloom and fall on the tree of our human life and float 
their fragrance across the turmoil of the days, and 
across the white mist, and through the bow of our 



20 



The Overplus of Blossom 



hope. Just a bloom, and no more, some of them, but 
still a bloom which abides with us wdiile we stay on 
this side the great river, as that sweet vision abides 
with me. Shall we not thank God, then, when we 
come to our better mind, for the blossoms which fall 
to so divine a purpose ? or shall this human sorrow pre- 
vent my sense of the divine glory, and mjy life-long 
regret for their fading blind me to the divine love 
which lay in their exquisite advent and grace? I would 
fain grow great enough, some time, to bless God even 
for this overplus of life in my home, and think of it as 
the outpouring of his heart on me for love's sake. I 
want to grasp a faith which will assure me he could not 
find it in his heart to give me only children, but would 
slip an angel, here and there, into my life, in this 
sweet disguise. These I have with me might well an- 
chor me too stoutly to the earth ; but those I liaei with 
me may draw me wonderfully, if I will let them, 
toward the heavens where they wait and watch until 
I come. 

IV. And, then, if I turn on myself and say, What 
is my hope of this blessed life to come, when my life 
here is but little better than a broken trust, turn where 
I will, ten resolutions broken where one is made good, 
the wrecks of undone or half-done duties strewing 
themselves over the roots of my life, the very hopes 
and anticipations of the better life not what they 
were at all in the brave outbreaking of my spring, 
and my whole manhood or womanhood poor and scant 
to weeping compared with what I once thought it 
might be V 

Well, if even this is my trouble, I will not be over- 



The Overplus of Blossom 



21 



troubled. The splendid hopes and aspirations of the 
soul's life are all beautiful and all good, as the over- 
plus of blossom, though there be but scant fruit from 
them, after all, to my poor thinking. 

I will tell my heart, then, how God knows better than 
we know what we are able to bear on to the harvest, 
what harsh winds also, from which there was no shelter, 
may have blown on the tree, and what fatalities from 
the old years before we came here to live our life may 
have hidden themselves, God help us, in the setting 
fruit, to smite it with withering. 

I will rest me in the parable of the overplus of blos- 
som. I will say, I am more than many trees. I will 
stand within the law of their life, and they shall stand 
within the law of mine. I will not be troubled or dis- 
mayed overmuch because this poverty has come where 
I looked for wealth. With these unattained desires and 
these withered aspirations I will not be over-troubled. 
I will not give way to despair. I will say to my soul, If 
that bush afire with the spring splendor could so storm 
one poor, halting man in Midian that it seemed as if God 
spake verily to him out of the bush, and the fruit of 
that blossoming was for the deliverance of a nation and 
the help of the world, then my fair hopes and aspira- 
tions, which have come to such scant fruitage as I look 
at them now, may have been fruit in their own time to 
others who needed just such a pulse of inspiration and 
aspiration to help them on their way as I had in my 
nature when it was all radiant with the blossoming of 
my spring.'' God knows beyond all my knowing, and 
he alone can measure the lapse between the blossom 
and the fruit. Let me stay sweet and trustful, then. 



22 



The Overplus of Blossom 



and do the best I may on to the fall of my year ; and 
then I will sing, — 

" I know these blossoms clustering heavily, 
The evening dew upon their faded leaves, 
Can claim small value or utility, 
Therefore shall fragrancy and beauty be 
The glory of my sheaves." 



THE WAY WHERE THE LIGHT DWELLETH. 



" Believe in the light." — John xii. 36. 

I REMEMBER how I Went oiice to a fine old city in 
my mother-land to see many things of a deep interest, 
and among them the choicest of all was a wonderful 
cathedral. 

It was a dismal morning when I got there, full of 
mist and rain, through which I could see the church 
looming up gray with age, but very grand ; and there 
was one window especially which touched me, as I saw 
it from no great distance, by its splendid outline and 
the exquisite delicacy of its carven work in stone. I 
could easily see also from where I stood that this win- 
dow was filled with stained glass, but it was quite im- 
possible to guess even at the artist's design from the 
outside, because the background within the church lay 
in a deep, dense shadow; nor was it meant to be seen 
in all its fair glory from that side by those who had 
done the work. It was as if you should look at the 
wrong side of a piece of tapestry, rude and ragged and 
all out of true, so there was no form nor comeliness in 
it as I stood there, and no beauty that one should 
desire it. 

But then I went within the church, and in an instant 



24 



The Way where the Light Dive lie th 



was aware of a noble transformation. The soft, misty 
light came in, revealing the master's intention and 
clothing all the figures in a dim, gray glory. Still, I 
remember that even in this there was no great satis- 
faction. The mist veiled the perfection of beauty, the 
colors hidden in the glass needed a background of sun- 
light and a clear sky to come forth in their full splen- 
dor; and so I went away. 

But about noon the mists rose and were swept away 
toward the German Ocean, while the sky opened into 
that tender blue you only seem to see in England in 
its perfection, like blue eyes dim with tears, through 
which the sun came out with a mild radiance ; and then 
I went again to see the great window. On the street 
it was still the same sights all blurred and blotted, so 
that the light which lay on it made the figures in the 
glass seem more uncouth than they were before ; but, 
when I went in again, I saw a great wonder. It was 
transformed before : it was now transfigured. The whole 
light of heaven was there for a background, and was 
smiting the window through and through. There stood 
the apostles and saints in a great cloud of glory, and 
above and below them the angels, and all about them 
the arms and heraldries of men who had given great 
gifts when the church was built or who had done 
grand deeds for the nation. Nothing seemed want- 
ing now the heart could desire. The wonderful dyes 
burned and flamed in the afternoon sun, and the pur- 
pose of the master came to me in this fair light of 
heaven. 

And so, as I have thought of this window now and 
then, among my choicer memories, it has touched me 



The Way whe7'e the Light DwelletJi 



25 



like a bright and cheerful parable of this world of ours, 
and our life, and of the one true way to find their 
meaning, so that we shall not doubt or fear finally, 
whatever may be our fortune, or think of its order and 
harmony, as I might have thought of that cathedral 
window if I had still insisted on solving its mystery as 
I stood outside on the street. Moreover, I have won- 
dered whether the dimness and dismay which trouble 
us all now and then may not come from our failure to 
find this true background of the clear heavens and the 
sun, through standing outside and looking in toward 
the shadows instead of standing inside and looking out 
toward the light ; and, then, whether we shall not find 
tnis truth as the large result of all our seeking, — that 
those who have found the finest fitness in this life and 
the fairest hope touching the life to come have always 
been the men and women who would still insist on 
finding this fair background for the problems we have 
to solve, and then on waiting and watching, at any cost, 
until at last the sun came out to make the whole pur- 
pose radiant to them, as my window was radiant in the 
clear afternoon. 

Because, if I may glance first at our common human 
nature, I think this is what we are sure to find ; that 
there is always a man looking in toward the shadows 
and another looking out toward the light ; and that no 
single truth we can ponder is more certain than this 
of the diverse standpoint from which we shall try to 
make out the mystery of our own life or the lives of 
those about us. It may be in the nature of the man 
or in his wilfulness, an inborn quality or one which has 
grown on him through the years. One can draw no 



26 The Way zvhere the Light Dwclleth 



line here, propound no dogma and utter no condemna- 
tion, because this human nature of ours is too vast and 
variant for any private interpretation. And so all we 
can say so far is this : that one man does insist on set- 
ting the design between himself and the fair lights of 
heaven, while another peers in forever toward the great 
shadowy vault. And I notice Bunyan thinks there 
must be a clear purpose to enter where the light 
dwells, and so to see the truth and grace which will 
keep you in heart through your pilgrimage; and it may 
be a certain stern insistence, also, ending in a fight. 
And so, Put my name down," he makes the man '^of 
a very stout countenance " say ; and then the man puts 
on his helmet, cuts his way through the guards, presses 
on toward the house Beautiful, and catches the vision 
of the eternal day, while the grand old dreamer smiles, 
and says, ''Verily, I know the meaning of this." But, 
then, he notices also how many give back and will not 
face the struggle, as if they felt it was not worth their 
while ; and this is the truth, I take it, of the stand- 
point and the vision common to us all. We nourish 
this or that spirit and temper, and turn toward where 
the shadows dwell or the light ; and it is as when face 
answers to face in a glass. 

And once more, when we leave this truth as it lies 
along the great lines of our common life, and notice its 
special power to help or hinder among those who are 
our ensample and inspiration, it is not hard to see what 
worth there is to them in finding this fair light of 
heaven. We can see how the grand presences which 
touch us most potently in the Bible are apt to be men 
of this spirit and temper, from Enoch who walked with 



Tlie Way where the Light Dwelleth 



27 



God and Abraham, the friend of God, to that John 
who stood on Patmos and saw the light which lights 
the sun strike through the heavy shadows and make all 
radiant at last down in the mines. It was trouble and 
dismay and halting to every one of these when they 
were looking in toward the shadows, but it v/as a joy 
which grew into great psalms when they stood at last, 
as they all do who are of most worth to us, looking out 
toward the light. 

David despairs when he stands, as he does so often, 
with his back to the sun. Nature is haggard then to 
him, and life a huge turmoil of selfishness and sin. 
But he finds his way into some holy place for the soul, 
and then the harmony masters the harsh discords ; and 
he sings of fire and hail, snow and vapor, summer 
softness and winter storm all blending together in 
the great design, and of man so mean and yet made 
higher than the angels, crowned with glory and 
honor. 

It is Paul's trouble also as he looks in toward the 
shadows. There is no help then for the sin-smitten 
race, so chapter after chapter bleeds with dishearten- 
ment, woe and pain and utter condemnation. But 
then he turns to where the light of God's eternal love 
shines through the blurred and ugly outlines, so dark 
and forbidding in the fog and mist ; and, lo ! the whole 
design stands forth to his heart in a golden glory as he 
sings,'' I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor 
princedoms nor powers, nor things present nor things 
to come, nor height nor depth, shall be able to sepa- 
rate us from the love of God." 

I take it to be the very genius of the Gospels, also, 



28 Tlie Way zvhere the Light Divelleth 



I 
! 



that Jesus never stands outside, so far as we are con- 
cerned, for an instant. But from the day when he takes 
the lilies and holds them up to the sun, and watches the 
birds on the wing between himself and heaven,— from 
that day to the day when he weeps over the doomed 
,city, but still whispers to those about him, When the 
worst comes to the worst, then look up," he is always 
looking toward the light. And so his word still keeps 
the world in heart, and helps us as no other word can 
help us to solve the sorest problems of life. 

Indeed, you will notice that, when he would touch 
the one singular instance of this spirit which cannot be 
content to peer in and ponder, but must always have 
a background of heaven and the sun, he takes a little 
child and sets him in the midst, and says. The kingdom 
of heaven, the kingdom, is like that little child. See 
how the small creature is always looking eagerly toward 
where the light dwelleth, and so is able to find some- 
thing of this kingdom in the poor and forlorn life which 
has fallen to his lot; never trying to spell out the se- 
cret from the wrong side \ always finding the place where 
the light will strike through all he can be aware of in 
the design ; familiar with heaven in his simple heart, and 
glad for it all as a lark in full song, catching the glory 
and hiding it away for the days when the mists will fall 
as he stands outside and the glory is only a memory. 
The little child he wnll have us see solves the problem 
of the standpoint for us all. His angels do always 
behold the face of my Father" ; while Schiller teaches 
the same truth when he says, My whole life has only 
been the interpretation of the visions and oracles of my 
childhood" ; and Wordsworth, when he sings, 



The Way where the Light Dwelleth. 29 



"Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come 
From God, who is our home." 

Here is the truth we find in our Bible, then, the book 
which helps us as no other book can help us, — the 
word of God, — when we once find the key. The men 
in there who help and inspire us to the best purpose 
are those who cannot and will not be content to believe 
in the shadows, but will have God's presence and his 
divine providence — himself^ vcl a word — for a back- 
ground to the design ; and for this they will struggle and 
strive if they must, and wait for the mists to rise 
and the heavens to grow clear, and then, in Psalm and 
Prophecy, in Gospel and Epistle, they say and sing 
these things we hold as the choicest treasure that ever 
came forth from the human soul. 

I notice how this is the truth, again touching those 
who have done most nobly in helping to reveal the 
beauty and fitness of the world we live in, and the 
loftier meanings and outlooks of the life we have to live. 
It was Newton's turn, who weighed the mountains in 
the scales, and the hills in a balance. It was old Jacob 
Boehme's way, who saw heaven as he sat cobbling shoes, 
and put Newton, it is said, on the track of the infinite 
order and harmony, and said to John Wesley, by the 
mouth of William Law, as the great apostle of Method- 
ism, stood looking in toward the shadows : This is no 
way to solve your problems. You must get heaven's 
light for your background, and you will find your way 
out of that dismay. So Wesley heard him, and obeyed, — 
saw all the wonder of the great design possible to his 



30 The Way where the Light Dwelleth 



day, and travelled 40,000 miles to tell what he had seen 
to those who sat in darkness and the shadow of death. 
It was their happy fortune ; and it was the very soul of 
Agassiz, who saw heaven through a pebble. That devout 
and beautiful spirit who, whenever I met him, seemed 
.to be standing with the whole sun in his face, went 
with the young men to the island the merchant prince, 
and more than prince, had given them for their summer 
studies, to spell out the meaning of the shells and rocks, 
the story of what God has been doing on this earth of 
ours through a time that smites one like an eternity. 
And, standing there for the first time, with these eager 
young souls about him, he said. Let us begin by looking 
up, each of us in his own spirit, to heaven ; while to the 
end of his life nothing pleased him better than to tell 
how he had found no trace of the fairer flowers or the 
birds that make music until he came on the track of 
man. And so it was to him as if God had said : This 
child of mine shall look on no desolate and haggard 
world. I will deck it with beauty and touch it with 
harmony to meet and clasp the beauty and harmony I 
have hidden in his heart, and the oriole and the rose 
shall be to him for tokens of my love. 

But Byron said, ''I am a torment to myself and to all 
who come near me " ; and it is not hard to see how this 
should be so apart from the vices that smote his life 
as with leprosy. Byron, with all his genius, as it seems 
to me, was forever looking in toward the shadows. 
And De Quincey says, ''I noticed the gloom in John 
Foster's eye travelling over all things with dismay." 
Well, this was Foster's trouble : that with all his great- 
ness as a thinker, and his purity and goodness and love 



The Way where the Light Dwelleth 31 



for all things good and true, he was always peering in 
toward the shadows, — human depravity, decrees of 
doom, hell-fires, ruthless judgments of God, the woful 
over-weight of sin in the human scales, and other things 
in the Scriptures no man should dare to take for God's 
truth as they are commonly interpreted, — peering and 
pondering as Cowper did so often, and Robert Hall, 
sometimes dwelling on what Bacon calls the problems 
dedicated to despair, and preaching, — 

" Like those dark birds that sweep with heavy wing, 
Cheering the flock with melancholy cries." 

They are found to be of no use, now, these ponderings 
and peerings from the wrong side, and only the glances 
they did compass now and then of the wholeness and 
beauty of the design, are what we take to our hearts. 

So you will notice it is, on the other hand, with the 
words that win the heart and sweeten and ennoble the 
life of man. We read the books or hear the discourse of 
those who are forever looking in toward the shadows, — 
but there is no rest in them, or help in trouble, or light 
or joy. We seek bread, and find a stone ; break the egg, 
and it holds a scorpion. We do not take such things 
to our sick that they may be healed, or pick the kernel 
out of them for our children. We know where to find 
the helpful things in the words of those who have seen 
the light strike through the mystery, and take these 
for the need we all strike soon or late. The men 
and women who stand in the front rank of our religious 
teachers and thinkers — not to sects alone, but to the 
natipns — are those always who look out toward the 
light and hold it in their hearts. Emerson, Bryant, 



32 



Tlie V/ay where- the LigJit Dwelleth 



Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Channing, Parker, Bel- 
lows, Beecher, Clarke, and a host besides, to speak only 
of the noble dead, — it is one golden chain from Alpha 
to Omega. The words which bring their own benedic- 
tion come home to us from those who have stood in 
the holy place and seen the light strike through, to 
find this as the last great word : God is light, and in 
him is no darkness at all ; and God is love. Such is 
the truth, as it comes to me, of fronting the light ; and 
now these are some of the lessons we may gather from 
it to help and hearten us. 

Does my life, as I must live it, trouble me ? and my 
fortune 1 Are these all a muddle, as poor Stephen says 
in the story .^^ Then I must lay this truth well to my 
heart : that the men who wun are very seldom those who 
are always peering and pondering on the dark side. 
They are those who get heaven and the sun for the 
background to their own best striving ; and then the 
fairest fortune possible to us comes through that win- 
some light. To lose this is to lose my strongest ally, 
and I put a cheerful courage on when I stand with my 
face to the sun. The successful men in the long fight 
with fortune are the cheerful men, or those, certainly, 
who find this fair background of faith and hope. Co- 
lumbus but for this had never found our New World, or 
men like Sam Adams struck the bell for the Revolution 
in the great old days. 

Is there trouble again wdth that wdiich lies deeper.'^ 
Are my health and strength in peril } Well, I think 
there can be little doubt of this : that those who are 
forever looking on the dark side of their illnesses and 
ailments, peering in toward the shadow^s when they 



The Way where the Light Dwelleth 33 

should face the light, toss away the finest chances left 
them to get well again ; while those who strive for a 
cheerful background of faith and hope either win health 
or, if this is not to be, win some high blessing which 
may come by sickness. 

There is an excellent satire under the cap and bells 
when the doleful doctor comes to see his patient, and 
says sadly to the poor man, There is not one chance 
in a thousand that you will get well, but I commend 
you to be cheerful. I want no such Jeremias when 
my turn comes to be sick, but men who will bring me 
all the good cheer in the world in their eyes and the 
tones of their voice and the touch of their hand, and will 
say to me. While there's life, there's hope, my friend; 
and I propose to help you get well. A dear friend of 
mine used to say of a fine old doctor in Philadelphia 
that his simple presence did his patients more good 
than his medicine, and was easier to take beyond all 
comparison. This was forty years ago. Well, such a 
presence is always a noble medicine in itself. The 
contagion of a cheerful soul helps us always to look 
toward the light, sets the tides of life flowing again, 
and cubes all our chances of getting well. It was a 
very common grievance among the surgeons who had 
this good cheer in them, when we used to leap out to 
nurse our men after the great battles, that well-mean- 
ing but woful-looking men of the old school — in theol- 
ogy, I mean — would invade the hospitals and rob the 
brave fellows of what courage was left in them by the 
dolor of their words and the sadness of their pres- 
ence, when the delicate balances between life and death 
drew about even, and not seldom would turn the scale 



34 The Way where the Light Dwelleth 



for death. I want no such curate for mind or body, no 
such doctor or nurse or priest. They must come as 
the good Christ came, — for healing, and not for affright. 
' Tis life of which my nerves are scant then ; and, if they 
have no ministry of life unto life, I can wait until some 
cheerful soul comes to give me a hand. 

Has that trouble smitten me for which I think there 
is no healing } Are those who were the very light of 
my life taken while I am left, — the lambs in the flock, 
the youth in its fair bloom, the manhood or Avoman- 
hood in its perfect prime ? It is a great and sore 
trouble. God forbid that I should say otherwise. How 
can 1 1 and, if I could, Jesus would rebuke me, weeping 
beside a grave. But may not the trouble within the 
trouble for the most of us be this : that we look in 
toward the shadows so ruthlessly, stand with our back 
to the sun, peer into the vault, nurse our vast and 
awful sorrow, and let this make havoc of us beyond all 
measure, instead of trying to find the place where the 
sunlight of the immortal life will smite through the 
trouble, and stir us to a new hope and expectation .^^ 
The one true way, I will tell my heart then, is to set 
our graves even against this background of heaven 
and the great and sure hope of man. Good Bishop 
Horne says, Wormwood eaten with bread is not bitter. 
Well, let me eat my wormwood, then, with the bread 
of life. here have been and are those who find the 
place where the light strikes through the grave, — yes, 
the very grave, — and then the whole haggard and 
hopeless sorrow suffers a change. So we must try to find 
that place, too, who sit in darkness and the shadows of 
death. There may be many things we cannot make 



The Way where the Light Dwelleth 



35 



out after all, as there was to me that afternoon in the 
great window ; but the light is there, burning through 
and this is the grand matter. Death has no dominion 
when we once find the place where a sure faith and a 
great hope in God can smite through these vast, sad 
shadows of death and the grave. 

So, if the truth stands good, finally that some will be 
forever looking toward the shadows, while others will 
never be content until they find where the light dwell- 
eth, let us, please God, be of these last. Those great 
souls of the old days and the new who help and inspire 
us to the finest purpose and the most divine have caught 
the secret of the true standpoint for you and me. Let 
me stand where they stood, fronting the light. Then it 
shall smite through sickness for me, and pain, and the 
dark glass of hard fortune, and make a nobler faith 
my own in life and death. Let me try to do as they 
did. Be wilful about this grand matter, — be cowed by 
no rebuff, tired out by no waiting, and beaten in no 
fight. 

Here is the rock," they said to me, when I was up 
among the miners, "and here is the gold, and we pursue 
it through thirty-six processes ; but there it is, you see, 
at last. Heft that bar, sir." So wilful would I be for 
this clear shining of God's resplendent sun, for this fine 
gold of his truth, — waiting, watching, and searching 
for it as those who search for hid treasure. I think 
the main trouble with my doubt and dimness is this : 
that I do nothing about it, but let them have their way, 
it may be, who tell us there can be no light on these 
misty mysteries. I may have been all too ready to fall 
in with such a conclusion and to stay outside. Let me 



36 The Way where the Light Dwelleth 



go into the holy place, and hear Him who said so 
grandly, I am the light of the world/' and has proved 
his word to be so grandly true in all these ages, then I 
shall not abide in the darkness, but shall have the light 
of life. 

Do I find this mist troubles me as I stand at the 
portals of life, and wonder how I shall win through. 
I will front the light. Do I find dimness in age, let me 
explore old Bunyan again, and have him tell me how 
those that fared on toward the end of their pilgrimage, 
faithful and true, came at last to where the sun shineth 
alway. Nay, is my faith itself in the shadow, — not 
lost, but in the mist, — then let me sing with the fine 
old Wesleyan heart in me I caught from her nurturing, 
"In hope against all human hope, self-desperate, I be- 
lieve," — sing until the sun comes out as I watch and 
wait, and hasten his shining by my singing. Nothing 
shall withstand my hungry wilfulness to front the light. 
I also will say, *^Put my name down, sir: I mean to go 
in there, and face the glorious appearing" ; and the old 
dreamer shall say of me, also, as he watches me from his 
hard-won eminence, "Verily I know the meaning of 
that." For 

Two powers, since first the world began, 
Have ruled our life, and rule it still. 
Twin forces in the life of man 
Are Faith and Will. 

"The pole-star and the helm of life, 
That sets the head, this gives the force. 
Through seas of peace, or stress and strife, 
To shape our course. 



The Way where the Light Dwelleth 

" These powers which stand in God's own strength, 
In dark and light, in joy and doom, — 
Unshaken are the powers at length 
That bring us home. 

" But where is home ? That faith can tell. 
But what is faith ? That will can prove 
In striving bravely, working well, 
And fronting God's eternal love." 



MARTHAS AND MARYS. 



" Mary sat at Jesus' feet and heard his word, but Martha was cum- 
bered about much serving." — Luke x. 39, 40. 

It was in Bethany these good women lived, as we 
learn from the Gospel by John, — an obscure place not 
far from Jerusalem, on the eastern slope of the Mount 
of Olives, where the road to Jericho dips suddenly 
toward the Jordan. And it is a pretty spot, those 
say who have been there, in a hollow of the slope, 
planted thick with fruit-trees, but otherwise of no ac- 
count ; for it is peopled by some twenty families as 
thriftless and shiftless as you will easily find, who live, 
as so many seem to do in the Holy Land, by the lies 
they tell about the so-called sacred places. Nor can 
the place have ever been of much account ; for it is not 
once mentioned in the Old Testament, and there are 
no signs that the hamlet ever overflowed the small cup 
in which it stands. 

This, again, was no formal visit Jesus made there, 
that the scene might be painted in the panorama of his 
three years' pilgrimage, so that the small place in the 
hollow of Olivet should be lifted into the light forever, 
like Bethlehem spoken of by the prophets and ordained 
to shine. He was on his way to Jerusalem. These were 
his friends, the sisters and the brother ; and he must 



Marthas a7id Marys 



39 



stay with them, as their guest, it may be, for the night, 
— a guest greatly honored and most welcome as we 
can see, to whom they will give the best they have, and 
to the friends who have come with him. And this must 
be done by the two sisters ; for the brother is not men- 
tioned here, and may have been away from home. 
And one of them loses no time, it is clear, touching 
the hospitable purpose which stirs her heart. She is, 
indeed, the owner of the place, and so it rests with her 
to see to it that the best is set on the board she has 
in the house ; while I think of her as one of those 
clever and capable women who can never be taken at 
a disadvantage in such a case as this, but can surprise 
those who have known her longest and best by the way 
in which she will call out her reserves. It is her pur- 
pose to do this now. You can see her rise to the rare 
occasion, think it over to herself for a moment or two, 
and then brighten up as she gets out her keys and moves 
swiftly about the house. It is a lovely little picture, 
and human, as we watch the good woman, and good 
housekeeper to the last line. They shall remember 
their visit as one of the events of a year or a lifetime, 
and shall fare well before they say farewell to go on 
their way. 

But just here she falls on a trouble. Mary, her sis- 
ter, and no doubt as good as gold in such a case usu- 
ally, fails the good Martha now, when she needs her 
most. It was the most natural thing in the world that 
she should be as busy as her sister was. So you would 
have felt in Martha's place, — the Marthas in my congre- 
gation. The good name of the house was to be main- 
tained, and due honor done to the guests by good and 



40 



Marthas and Marys 



loving service. But, while she also is busy, as we may 
presume, helping Martha, Jesus begins to speak of the 
things which always lay so deep in his heart, — how 
the kingdom of God is as leaven, it may be, when they 
began to make the bread, and as old and new wine, 
touching these homely things for divine lessons. We 
do not know what he said, only that Mary sat at his 
feet and listened, while poor Martha had everything to 
do, first to make ready and then to serve. 

Nor can we easily believe that the good Martha 
gave up without giving Mary what we should call a 
piece of her mind in frowns and whispers before she 
was driven to the last extremity, and would have to 
shame her before the whole company; for this would 
be as natural as all the rest. She was sharp, to be 
sure, for this they say is implied in her name, and 
could be a little more than sharp, as our Marthas are 
apt to be before time mellows them and makes them 
sweet, — time and the grace of Heaven. But, if this 
was so, it was all no use. Mary sits still and listens, 
and is lost to all that is going on about her; and then 
the much tried woman makes her appeal to the guest 
and friend: Dost thou not care that my sister hath 
left me to serve alone .'^ Bid her, therefore, that she 
help me.'' While it is the surmise of a rare scholar 
and seer I love to follow that there is a touch of des- 
peration in this swift and keen appeal of kin to that of 
the disciples in the great storm, — Carest thou not 
that we perish.^" In any case, she will be patient no 
longer, or keep her impatience to herself. She must 
speak out. 

Nor is the surmise poor or thin that Jesus had not 



Marthas and Marys 



41 



noticed the sister's trouble at all down to this moment, 
or thought it strange that Mary should not be busy 
with her sister, or been aware, indeed, of what was 
there before his eyes. It was one of those high mo- 
ments when his meat and drink was to reveal the truth 
which had come to him instantly from on high, as it 
was when he sat talking to the woman by the well; 
and then, when they brought him bread, he said, I 
have bread to eat ye know not of." 

In the great and moving moments in our own lives 
we can all tell how we were lost to the things about 
us, — lost in the vision, so that we forgot the needs 
of the body and the passing of time. So it may have 
been, and so I think must have been with him that 
day. But now here was Martha with her cutting ques- 
tion. Dost thou not care that my sister hath left me 
to serve alone } Bid her, therefore, that she help me." 
And then, in an instant, he would see where the trou- 
ble lay and how to meet it, but not as she would think 
he would meet it, — the good and loyal friend of over- 
burdened men and women, who made their trouble his 
own. This trouble was of quite another tenor from 
those that always moved his heart to pity and swift 
succor. This good friend, with the best of all good 
will in her kindly and hospitable heart, had got herself 
snared in a net of her own netting : she was careful 
and troubled about many tilings. Very good things, 
and needful there and then as she thought, but quite 
at the other pole of our human life and duty as the 
question touched him that day, and as it may touch us 
now. Many things, — social duties, hospitable aspira- 
tions, kindly endeavors, and the best she had for the 



42 



Mai'thas and Marys 



best she knew. These friends who were living very 
much as the birds live were to be ministered unto by 
one good meal. They were men friends, and therefore 
in the more need of her ministry, — men friends and 
ministers of the word of life, and therefore to be cared 
for, so she had been taught from her childhood, no 
doubt, with all the more care and pains. It is a sweet 
human picture, as I said, when you wipe the dust of the 
ages away, and restore the lost lines ; and who shall 
blame the good Martha for her touch of temper and her 
half-command, Bid Jier^ therefore, that she help me".^ 
He does not blame her, but, as I listen, there is a tender, 
lingering, loving kindness in the repetition of her name 
even, as he says, Martha, Martha, thou art troubled 
about many things ; but one thing is needful." He 
would not rebuke : he would only help her to see where 
the truest hospitality lay, — and do this not as the 
Master and Lord, but the good friend and guest. And 
so I think we do him dishonor when we give his words 
another and harsher meaning. 

Nor should we lose track of the simple and quite 
human purpose which prompts the divine lesson he 
would suggest to his over-troubled hostess and good 
friend. We all know how it would touch him when 
he saw what her trouble was, who have gone to the 
home of some friend in very much the same way, — 
not, it may be, expected, but right welcome all the 
same. When we have had to notice how full of care the 
house-mother was about our handsome and fitting en- 
tertainment, we wanted to say : Do sit down, and take 
no thought of what we shall eat or what we shall drink. 
We have come to see you all, and here are so many 



Marthas and Marys 



43 



things we all want to say, — books to mention, events 
to discuss, memories to brighten, hopes to touch, deep 
things and high to wonder over, — and it may be now or 
never. And so what can a feast of fat things and wine 
on the lees well refined be to such a communion of the 
spirit and the life ? Bring out the loaf and the cup, as 
if you had no guests at all, and do not be cumbered by 
much serving. We will serve ourselves. So it must 
have been that day. He was no anchorite, as we know, 
but would go to a feast on occasion, and had no rebuke 
for the good woman's feast now. But there sat the 
sister she had scored with her sharp tongue, listening 
to the word borne into his heart that instant from on 
high, — the bread of life and the water of life, — the 
word made flesh and dwelling among them from sun- 
set to gray dawn, and the word which was to lie within 
the heart of a new gospel ; not his word, but the word 
of the Father which sent him, and he was speak- 
ing to him then. So Mary must be vindicated, 
and the sting drawn from the good sister's rebuke. 
She was true to her own soul and the soul of the truth 
and the time. This was the event of a lifetime, and, 
while she did not know it, the lifting of the home in 
the hollow into a light that never lay on land or sea ; 
and so, he said, Mary hath chosen that good part which 
shall not be taken from her. 

So the story of an evening opens to my mind as they 
sit there forever now, the Master and his friends ; while 
the one sister hurries about the house so intent on serv- 
ing, and the other sits still listening to his words who 
spake as never man spake, and as one having authority, 
not as the scribes. In a paper I took up the other day 



44 



Marthas and Marys 



a rustic tells how he would be busy about his farm or 
hurrying on an errand, when one of the last age who 
was also filled with the Holy Spirit would walk along 
the green lane by the Lake in Westmoreland, unaware 
of any other presence, saying words fresh from the foun- 
tain of the divine inspiration that hold so many of us 
now by their sweet, strong spell. But all the listener 
could do was to wonder how a man so able otherwise 
could spend his time talking in that way all to himself, 
and to a far poorer purpose than if he had been re- 
peating the multiplication table, or in any sense so fit- 
ting as what the parson said on Sunday in the queer old 
church. One has to wonder whether our good Martha 
had not some such feeling about the high discourse 
that fell on her ear, as the rain falls on the water fowl, 
while she went about the house with the chicken and 
omelet and the fine wheaten cakes and the milk and 
honey on her mind, glancing at her sister and glowering, 
as we used to say in the north, until she can no more 
help that sharp word than our good friend Mrs. Poyser 
can in the story, — the perfect Martha of her day and 
generation. It was Martha's opportunity, also, to hear 
the word, and we hear in a casual way from other 
quarters that she was a good, sound churchwoman 
and much" given to listening to the holy men in the 
synagogue on Sunday and to good works ; and we may 
be sure of the good works even more than of the listen- 
ing, especially if there were signs that one of the hives 
would swarm before the holy day was over or the thun- 
derous weather turn the milk. 

But this was a week-day, and here were the guests, 
these good men and the Master, who so seldom had a 



Marthas and Marys 



45 



good meal set before them ; and what discourse ever 
was so momentous to Martha as this social and, to her 
mind, most sacred obligation ? So they are own sisters, 
and no doubt true and loving sisters, but with this di- 
verse temper of the heart and mind when we catch this 
swift glimpse of them in the hollow of Olivet : The one 
quiet as a Quaker and content to sit still this one even- 
ing, whatever she may do to-morrow, and sun her soul 
in the light fresh from heaven ; the other busy as a 
whole swarm of bees, and ready to bizz out wi' angry 
pyke," while the words fall from his lips she would 
give the world, no doubt, to hear, when so many years 
after she is an exile in the South of France, so say the 
traditions, for love of him. She loved him in her own 
way when she turned on him and said, Dost thou 
not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone ? 
Bid her that she help me/' And the same Martha in the 
Legends again as she is in the Gospels ; for she slays 
a dragon, — a thing Mary never would have done, — a 
noisome and ugly thing w^hich was devouring the chil- 
dren in Marseilles, — an evil marsh, . I take it, or the 
mother of all bad drains, — with diphtheria and the scar- 
let fever ; for it takes Martha to do that, after all. 

Shall I say once more, then, that it is no wonder the 
Fourth Gospel, and the last in the divine series, tells us 
how Jesus loved Martha and Mary, and mentions the 
good and true woman after her type first, as if the Holy 
Spirit had held the pen this instant, as indeed it does in 
many instants now, and would make her this amends 
for the half-bitter word she said this day, and the in- 
jury done to herself for so good a reason as her temper 
and disposition ran toward all generous and hospitable 



46 



Marthas a7id Marys 



ends ? And shall we not say, as we leave her wonder- 
ing over the Master s words, and half inclined to cry, — 
for the tears are very near the eyes with the Marthas, — 
that we must not wonder the divine heart in him who 
knew what was in man and woman should still go out 
* to this capital and much cumbered w^oman, so anxious 
about the duty and grace of hospitality and of good 
\i.OM^^-keeping ; the crown and glory of her life and 
of her ancient Scriptures, and say also for her vindica- 
tion, as we note her worth, What would the world be 
without our Marthas, who cumber themselves so sore, 
and very much as she did, by much serving ? Who are 
so noble, indeed, and capable to take care of themselves 
in our modern life that they need no advocate ; but the 
Marys rather need one, as she did who sat at the 
Master's feet in the old time, and was lost in his word. 
In this modern life and the life in this fervid centre, es- 
pecially, where not to be a Martha, when the demand is 
on you to see well to your home and your social duties, 
is to be next of kin to nobody among the good women 
of our city, and of Boston, let us say with a slightly 
deeper emphasis, this is the canon of our woman- 
hood, — to stand by Martha; while of our manhood it 
may be, — for I would walk delicately here, the less 
I say, the better. Still, is it not true that we all 
want these Marthas to look after us rather than the 
Marys, — to see, as the older Scripture says, that we 
are honored among the elders in the gate if the years 
have told on us, or, if we have to make our way up the 
ladder, to be our help-meet and lend a hand as we 
climb, and so make good the axiom that the man must 
ask his wife how far up he shall go t We love to 



Marthas and Marys 



47 



see the home crisp and bright as a new-minted dollar, 
and to see the house-mother rise to the level of the 
swiftest demand when the guests come in, or we bring 
them in, even at the cost of that sharp word now and 
then, which is not for the sister or the guests, and, if 
we are not mere clowns, and no gentlemen, enjoy it per- 
haps, as we enjoy the blowing of the west winds these 
spring days, but take care not to say so, while it well 
contents us, take us in the mass, to hear how the Marys, 
who have only this fine grace for their gift, — to be still 
now and then, and listen, and, it may be, speak or write, 
— how they cannot hold a candle to the Marthas in the 
social or the housekeeping life, and are of quite no ac- 
count so far in the town or the country side. 

The Marthas, then, need no advocate in the life we 
are living, with its crowded hospitalities and thick-sown 
social duties ; but, then, we have to ask the question I 
have answered in part already, — whether this is true 
of the Marys, of whom it was said they have chosen the 
good part which shall not be taken from them. Is this 
the better part on which so many of us, men and women 
alike, have come to set such store in these times, or in 
any time.^ Have they struck the great key-note of life 
in France, let us say, for an instance, where they are 
so proud of the capacity and quality of the woman in 
the home, in society, and in business, — the matchless 
Marthas, so clever and capable that the men folk, as 
you used to call them in New England, are content to 
be ciphers very often to their unit, and only to plume 
themselves on their Panama canals and copper trusts, 
in which they waste what the Marlhas have made.'^ If 
I have learned the mere alphabet of a true and noble 



48 



Marthas and Marys 



life, I say No to such a conclusion now and forever, and 
stand by His word who said, Mary hath chosen the 
good part, when she had caught the great and high 
moment on the wing and sat at his feet, content to 
drink in the divine word fresh from heaven, and let all 
else wait or be blown down the wind, if it must be so, 
for that great golden opportunity to see far into heaven. 
In the old time, when the highest things came to us 
on the bee-line, as they come still to our children, the 
holiest and highest came not through the man, but 
the woman ; and this was especially true of the Greek 
and Roman and the race to which we belong. It is the 
bud to the blossom. It is the fruit to the vine. It is 
the alphabet to the Bible in this truth I want to touch, 
— the truth that not the priest, but the priestess, is the 
grand factor in the diviner life of man now; and the 
Marys, not the Marthas, that we must look to for the 
highest and the best, — of whom we have to ask the ques- 
tion, How high shall we go } I allow the claim gladly 
of her sister's energy and faculty, and all noble quali- 
ties beside that belong to her nature ; but all the same 
I say of Mary, She hath chosen that good part which 
shall not be taken from her. The home, the church, 
the city, and the republic, and the world all around 
wait finally for the Marys rather than the Marthas, so 
far as the woman has her portion and lot in its highest 
and truest life, — the woman and womanhood of the 
deeper heart and vision whose life is hid with Christ's 
in God. 

It came to me to think and speak of this again 
through the sudden hush, over which I never cease to 
wonder, which falls on the Marthas when Lent * comes 



* Lent, 1890. 



Marthas and Marys 



49 



round among those who stand within the lines of the 
Roman and Episcopal Churches especially, and in one 
way or another touches us all. There has been no 
such devouring hospitality since I came to live in New 
York as I have noticed this winter, or such dissipation 
of life, — I use the word in no evil sense, — in v/hich 
they have had to bear the main burden; and not sel- 
dom I have heard the longing expressed that Lent 
might come, and then they would be free from this 
cumber of much serving as hostess or guest. It is a 
wise and gracious provision of these great old churches 
for the Marthas of their fold. No more of that, they 
say. For forty days you must sit down, also, with the 
Marys now, and listen to the word from on high. The 
channels of your life must be deepened and cleared of 
the sand, so that the waters may run sweet and clear. 
Hear the Church. It is our habit to smile at this, and 
congratulate ourselves that we are under no such bond- 
age ; but may we not ask, as we do this, whether it is 
not freedom to great hosts of Marthas who have been 
wearing their lives out and their souls away in what 
they call their social duties, — this first, and then, what 
is better still, if they are true to the primitive intention 
of the holy time, the sitting down with Mary and let- 
ting the heavy care go by of so much serving, while 
they open their heart to higher and better things, and 
have some crumbs of the good part which shall not be 
taken from them, so that their life shall not be like the 
river I saw in the Far West, — a long drift through 
the dry desert, — to be lost finally in the sands and 
create only a marsh, — the Humboldt sink they call it. 
The thought of the sisters touches me also to this 



so 



Marthas and Marys 



closer purpose, that those who hear me shall mind this 
truth from the Master's lips. It is the natural instinct 
of our finer womanhood to range with Martha, and be 
like her, as it is the drift of the time. To be clever and 
hospitable and able, not seldom to hold your own in the 
world's business as w^ell as a man, or to surpass many 
men, — in this I have taken pains to mark my admira- 
tion of Martha ; But, as I think of the ever-growing ten- 
dency to be cum.bered about many things, as she was, 
and note the multitudes of women so cumbered, I won- 
der where the Marys are, and how many of them are 
left of this nobler mind and purpose, — maidens who 
will not give all their time to the w^orld's ways and fash- 
ions, or to light and frivolous reading and the charm of 
light conversation, or to running hither and yonder on 
vain and empty errands, or even to more serious things 
that still go only to the making of Marthas, but will 
have their time for listening to the diviner voice, the 
still, small voice, the whisper of the Holy Spirit of God. 
And women in the heart of the world's life who find 
they must nourish the deeper heart of I\Iary while their 
lot lies greatly with Martha, — and it may be their 
temper and disposition also, — that they may not only 
save their own souls alive, but be help-meets, indeed, to 
those of us who are as the life of their life, and who, it 
may be, can only climb the ladder which reaches toward 
heaven as they stand on the step above us and hold out 
their hand, and who will say to the children what He 
said who took them in his arms and blessed them, and 
then make it all come true, — of such is the kingdom of 
heaven, — how many are there? Many, many, many, 
or our life in this New World holds no great hope for 



Marthas and Marys 



51 



man. Clever as they are and good as gold, these good 
Marthas, the saving salt of the noblest and best, the 
deeper heart and devout and reverent is not in them as 
it was in the primitive mothers of the nation ; and we 
must have women like these and like Mary always. 

Many such women there are, as my faith runs ; and my 
sight now and then confirms my faith. Lucretia Mott 
was one of them, — as good a Martha as the world held 
in her time, but then, also, as good a Mary. The home 
kept perfectly, the children trained beautifully, and all 
living their own lives well, the social duties which 
must be observed all kept up to the line, everything of 
that sort well done ; but, then, this also, the quiet in- 
ward life kept sweet and free to hear the word, deep 
thoughts of the heart coming and going in communion 
with the highest, the few choice books, heart books, 
read and read again, and a glance of the eye toward 
all the great and hopeful movements in the world's 
great life. 

Elizabeth Gaskell, also, the busy pastor^s wife in Man- 
chester, with a great parish on her hands and wide- 
reaching social and home duties of every sort,- — a per- 
fect Martha, as I found her once, — yet also, if we may 
judge, a perfect Mary, sitting at the Master's feet and 
listening, and writing Ruth and Mary Barton." 
Martha could not write them, only Mary. And so it is, 
and has been always. 

It is what I plead for in this Lenten sermon ; for 
why should we not also hear Lenten sermons ? I would 
begin at the beginning, and this is with the Marthas 
and Marys. Shall we ask what the next age will be, 
we must not ask the men of this age, or the ministers, 



52 



MartJias and Ma7ys 



or the schools even, and colleges. We must ask the 
maidens and wives and mothers, and the womanhood 
all round, the Marthas and Marys apart or in one. 
They hold the casting vote for goodness and righteous- 
ness and truth ; and you w^ho hear me are among them, to 
whom Paul also said, Be not conformed to this w^orld, 
but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, that 
ye may know what is the good and acceptable and per- 
fect will of God." 



THE PARABLE OF THE RESERVES. 



" But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps." — Matt. 
XXV. 5. 

The parable of the ten virgins is, on the whole, a 
sad story. You do not care for the one-half of them 
the instant after they enter the door, — or before they 
enter, for that matter, — when once you find them out, 
and take note of what seems to be their utter selfish- 
ness. Your heart stays outside with the five who are 
peering in through the windows, listening to the 
music and weeping while the others are dancing. 
You say. It is too bad, and would fain open the door 
and let them in also; while you wonder why the bride- 
groom is not of your mind, and begin to make excuses, 
and to find reasons for a fairer conclusion than this 
which is written. There was no harm in them, you 
say. They were only thoughtless, and even this 
might come in such a case through their eager haste 
to be on hand. This would be in itself a fine trait. 
Or their lamps may have gone out through the 
boundless generosity of their burning, while those 
of the other five were kept alive by parsimony in the 
use of the oil, as well as the forethought which pro- 



54 



The Parable of the Reserves 



vided a reserve. At any rate, you would like to 
know the rights of all this before you make up your 
mind to leave these poor damsels to their distraction. 
And, even if you were sure it was a just judgment, 
you w^ould still owe those insiders a grudge for not 
squeezing out a few drops at least to help their sisters 
up to the door, at some risk to their own lamps, so 
that they might all go in or stay out together. Or, 
what would be well worth the trying, trust that on 
his wedding day, at any rate, the master of the feast 
would be of a generous mind, and say. Come in, every 
one of you, when they all came in the dimness to the 
door, and told him how it was no use thinking of 
leaving the one-half there on the street to take their 
chance at the closed doors, so their lamps had all gone 
out through a motive they were sure he would admire 
above all things in his own wife. 

Neither are you satisfied with the way in which the 
parable is comm_only made to open toward our life and 
its outlooks hereafter. In the German there is a story 
of Frederick, Margrave of Misnia, who in 1322 went 
to see one of the old Mystery Plays drawn from the 
parable, in which the five wise virgins were the 
noblest women the playwright could im^agine. But 
they had grown hard and stern as fate to their hapless 
comrades, and~ left them easily outside weeping and 
wailing, which, when the prince saw, he was so 
amazed that he fell into a grievous sickness, crying, 
What is our Christian faith, then, and love? died on 
the fourth day after, and was buried at Eisenach. 
And we are very much of the Margrave's mind. If 



The Parable of tJie Reserves 



55 



our faith means anything, we say, worth the name, it 
means that we shall help each other when the pinch 
comes, at any cost, and grow rich by giving rather 
than by hoarding; while about the meanest thing a 
man or woman can do is to nourish the idea of crowd- 
ing into whatever bliss may be awaiting, no matter 
who may have to stand outside, and having your fill of 
joy while your old comrades are in despair. 

It is a fair objection, born of all that is most gen- 
erous and noble in our human nature, and by conse- 
quence most divine. It seems as if such a selfish 
spirit would make heaven itself anything but welcome 
to those of wider sympathies and a deeper pulse of 
grace, when they found themselves in such company. 
And so these interpretations are rejected as unworthy 
the grand and generous soul of the gospel of the Son 
of God. But I think the truth is that we fall into 
this trouble and many more of this kind through our 
misconceptions, and say one thing when our great 
Teacher means another. So it is of the life to come 
he is speaking here, the commentators say; yet, when 
you read what precedes and follows the parable, you 
find it is not the life to come which is in his mind 
then, and least of all our notions of that life, but the 
life right there they had to live in those days and we 
have to live now, with its outlooks and inlooks, and 
the kingdom of heaven is no far-away world among the 
lights and shadows of eternity, but the life of God in 
human souls on this earth, while even then it is not 
that life as we insist on it in our sermons and sys- 
tems, but the widest and deepest relation of man to 



56 



The Parable of tJie Reserves 



God we can imagine, meeting us at every turn and 
keeping the record of all we do. 

This is the way, therefore, the parable I want to 
touch opens to my mind. There was trouble in the 
air as Jesus was speaking. He saw it through his 
divine insight; while those about him still felt safe 
and sure of their lives and fortunes, and would not be 
disturbed of their rest. It is coming, he tells them 
once and again, as a thief in the night; and no ele- 
ment in it, as he foresees, will be more terrible than 
its surprise. It will be like a thunderbolt out of a 
clear sky, like the swift agony of fire in a sleeping 
city, like the spring of a wild thing as you walk with- 
out a fear through the quiet glades of a forest, like all 
great trials now and forever, when you least expect 
them. 

Then he foresees how there will be a division among 
those who spring out of the slumber to meet the de- 
mand of the day and night, — how some will have re- 
serves of light and life and the power to hold their 
own, while others who have no such reserves will have 
to give up and lose their place, submit to the loss, 
and stand outside; while this must all come to pass 
through a law of life against which there is no appeal 
and for which there is no help save through seeing to 
the reserves of oil in good time, and so being pre- 
pared for the demand when it comes suddenly on all 
alike There may be the best desire in the world on 
the part of those who are ready to help the rest who 
must fall back; but there is no margin, and so no way. 
The reserves must be there ready to meet the demand, 



The Parable of the Rese^'ves 



57 



then the end of it all will be glory and honor; but not 
there, it is too late to create them, and the end is 
disgrace and shame. It is not a question of sentiment, 
therefore, but of life in its solemn ordeals, and not so 
much of the way we shall win into heaven as the way 
we shall live, first of all, to the truest purpose on the 
earth. 

So, when we set the parable in this light, it is not 
hard to see how it enters into our own life and time, 
and brings the truth home no man can afford to neg- 
lect, — the truth that we must also have the reserves 
to fall back upon when the demand comes, or we can 
never spring forward to any great purpose, — Reserves 
of life or light, of courage or character, of insight or 
endurance, or of whatever the demand may be; for, 
failing here, it is as when the wells fail in a dry time 
because they have no deepness or power to reach the 
perennial springs. 

In our common life we may do as well as those 
about us, or seem to be doing better, even, if we are 
reckless about the reserves, while others are carefully 
storing them away. But the truth is, such times are 
no test of the man and manhood any more than the 
piping times of peace, when they flame out in scarlet 
and gold in London, are a test of the queen's guards, 
or than our own men were tested when they marched 
southward through our streets with their music and 
banners. It is Waterloo and the Crimea, Chancel- 
lorsville and Ball's Bluff, and such grim backgrounds 
as these, against which they must stand before the 
matchless manhood can come into high relief and 



58 



The Parable of the Reserves 



reveal the truth of the reserves. And so we can all 
go easily enough through our own easy-going times, 
make good headway, as we imagine, and hold our own 
with the best, while such times hold no virtue in 
them to bring out the reserved power. 

They are like the main part of a voyage I made 
once across the Atlantic, in w^hich the weather was so 
pleasant and all things ran so smoothly that I suspect 
the most of us felt we were about a match for the 
captain, and concluded it was no great thing, after all, 
to run a steamer, when you once got the lines. But a 
great storm struck us as we were nearing Cape Race, 
and all night long the good ship shuddered and panted 
through the mighty billows or over them; and when 
next morning, peering deckward, we saw our captain 
standing by the main mast, his arms twisted about the 
ropes, swinging in the tempest and watching it with 
steady eyes, alert and cheerful, though they told us 
he had been on deck all night, — turning his vessel 
round in the thick of the tempest and the trough of 
the sea, so that she might escape the awful strain and 
the avalanche of waters which were filling many with 
dismay, — then we knew our captain. The reserv^es 
were shining out. Here w^as a man no storm could 
daunt, and who, if the worst had come, would no 
doubt have been the last to leave the ship. That man 
had light in him and life equal to the demand, — oil 
in the vessel with his lamp; and s:> he brought us to 
the desired haven. 

1. Now this demand, when we bring it home, 
touches, first of all, our life itself. For your wise doc- 



The Parable of the Reserves 



59 



tor will tell you that about the best thing you can do is 
to keep as fine a reserve of vitality as you can possibly 
store away, if you mean to give him a chance when 
some day he has to help you pull through in the sore 
conflict between life and death to which we are open, 
exactly, perhaps, when we least expect it. And how 
many times we have all heard that same sad story! 
Nothing could be done for him, because there was 
nothing to fall back upon. He had no reserve of 
power to fight through: he used up all his life as he 
went along. And that most cheering story, on the 
other hand: He was about as sick as a man can be to 
live; but he had a splendid constitution and great 
reserves of power, and so he pulled through. Here, 
then, is the first meaning of oil in my vessel with my 
lamp, as it lies in my very life. I can be wary and 
foreseeing about this blessing on which all other 
things I can be and do down here must rest; and then, 
when the last stern test comes, it is as if so many 
more strands were cabled about the one slender thread. 
So many a life has ended all too soon through what 
we call a mystery of providence, when the most heed- 
less and reckless improvidence has really used up the 
reserves; and so we should be careful how we use 
such a term or go after a mystery while the simple 
truth waits right under our eyes. We use up these 
reserves, and are smitten by a sickness which would 
draw on all our powers if we had kept them stored 
away, but they are wasted ; and then I speak as a man 
when I say that the Eternal God is as powerless to 
pull us through as the good doctors are, while, if it 



6o The Parable of the Resei'ves 

were otherwise, we can imagine no greater misfortune, 
for we should all turn spendthrifts in the assurance of 
getting a renewal. There is no such subtle tempta- 
tion to improvidence as that which lies in the feeling 
that the high powers will suspend the law if we do 
but cry loud and long enough. 

And still another truth waits to be touched before 
we pass this first line; this, namely, that these re- 
serves of life mean more than mere living. They 
mean what the Master hinted at, — an enduring bright- 
ness breaking into joy, because the man who has the 
most life, and still knows how to use and store it, has 
usually the most worth of life. The grace and glamour 
of existence come of the overplus of oil. Show me 
a man who is running forever on a close margin, and 
I will show you a man w^ho has more than his share 
of dark, grim days, one to whom the beauty of the 
spring, the glory of the summer, the ripeness of the 
fall, and the white splendor of winter often come on 
bootless errands. The reserves mean not mere liv- 
ing, then, but what gives life worth in this simple 
and natural sense; and we may all cry, who have 
these empty lamps, to our sorrow, — 

" 'Tis life of which our nerves are scant, 
Life, and not death, for which we pant, 
More hfe, and fuller still, we v;ant." 

II. These reserves mean, in the second place, 
character; for we can store up character, as we store 
up life, if we take care and become so rich and strong 
that, when these sudden and searching emergencies 



The Parable of the Reserves 6 1 

try us as by fire, we suffer no loss, but come out per- 
fect and entire, lacking nothing. For you can all 
name men of whose stout and sterling manhood you 
feel so sure that, if one should come to you in the 
guise of an angel of light, and accuse them of 
knavery, you would look for the cloven foot on that 
accuser, — men to whom you could trust your life and 
fortune and sacred honor, and go to sleep without 
the least tremor of fear after all the revelations of 
weakness and wantonness touching great trusts that 
are enough to wither the heart. They are the men 
who store up these reserves of character, treasures of 
insight and foresight, of fortitude and courage, and 
never lose their head, no matter how the solid earth 
seems to rock in panic and convulsion, but are strong 
and quiet, and keep their lamps shining full and clear 
through the darkness. The trial of their manhood 
may come, then, when it will, whispering tongues 
may poison truth, the fearful and unbelieving may 
desert them, and those even who believe in them 
most thoroughly may be troubled; but their reserves 
will not fail. The clear shining from their lamp 
will not end in a smoke and a stench. They will 
stand in the evil day; and, when they have done all, 
stand. The man who has just conduct and character 
enough to run along in easy times, but lays up no 
reserves on which he can draw when the cry strikes 
the midnight of disaster, can have no great peace or 
joy; but he has both who stores up the reserves on 
which he can draw when the challenge comes to hold 
up the light strong and clear. 



62 



The Parable of the Reserves 



III. Or these reserves may mean, in the third 
place, achievement, the power to do the grandest 
thing possible to our manhood when the demand 
comes for this reserve, and cube our power out of 
the latent stores; to do well always, but the best in 
the crisis on which all things turn; to stand the 
strain of the long fight with fate or fortune, and still 
to find we have something left which will meet the 
uttermost demand. 

In our lifetime we shall see no grander instance of 
this reserve which shines forth in achievement than 
that Stanley reveals in his story of "Darkest Africa." 
"In perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils 
of Jus own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in 
perils in the wilderness, in perils among false breth- 
ren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, 
in hunger and thirst, in fastings often," to the very 
clutch of death to cast another black shadow then 
across the dark continent, the brave heart could not 
break, the steadfast eyes looked right on, the mighty 
spirit dominated the weak and failing flesh, the re- 
serves tell the story, the grandest story of these last 
times. 

And so it may be with your life and mine in the 
things we have to do. We can store up life and light 
for this crisis of all well-doing when it comes, — an 
inward and spiritual substance of manhood like that 
which was found in the great conflict, when delicate, 
town-bred men would tire down the young giants of 
the backwoods and prairies, outfight them, and outlive 
them; and the fine reserves of the Harvard men cov- 
ered them with glory, while the shallow and brutal 



The Parable of the Reserves 



63 



might of "Billy Wilson's Regiment" ended in dis- 
grace and shame. An inward and spiritual substance 
of manhood, I say, nothing can exhaust, which brings 
us at last to the front with the light burning high and 
clear from the oil in the vessels with the lamps. 

And I have dwelt so long on these more outward 
truths of the doctrine of the reserves, because they 
appear to me to be of the utmost worth in this light 
to those who would come worthily through these tests 
of our manhood in life, in character, and in the work 
we have to do; and then, again, because they point 
inward to deeper and diviner verities we have to mind. 

For, as we can store up these virtues against the 
trial of our outward life, so we can store up other 
against the trial of our inward life. Faith, hope, 
and love, and whatever makes the most noble and god- 
like man as these I have dwelt on, reveal the even 
man and manhood. 

Because, to speak first of our faith in God and his 
eternal providence and love, we need not merely 
enough to live through the common experiences of 
our life, but stores of faith to fall back upon, oil in 
the vessel with the lamp, when woe and disaster 
cover our life as with a pall of death. When we wake 
up suddenly some day to wonder whether God can be 
in his heaven and we so forlorn on the earth, and if 
his Christ was not mistaken in his abiding confi- 
dence, and the apostles mistaken, and the holy saints, 
— to wake up with this fear shaking the heart in us, 
and then to wonder what better we can do than just 
to grit our teeth and take it as it comes, waiting for 
the long sleep of death. 



64 



The Palpable of the Reserves 



Millions of poor, forlorn souls have come to this 
pass, this via mala in the last sore trial of their faith, 
— the light gone out and no oil in the vessel with the 
lamp. And I have found in my long ministry many a 
time that it was of no use trying to give them of my 
faith, and so try to tide them through, so that they 
should finish their course with joy. The oil could 
not pass from man to man, — there seemed to be no 
channel ; and in them there was no reserve. But how 
many I have found who had struck the same sore 
troubles, and who were able to rise out of them 
through the reserves into the very life and light of 
God! No disaster could overcome them. No trial 
of their faith could break them quite down. It 
was no matter that the heavens so neighborly to 
them of old were black as a starless midnight, save 
for the pain of it, and the woe, or that "from out 
waste nature came a cry, and murmurs from the dying 
sun." The reserves were there. They could say, I 
know in whom I have believed. So they drew on the 
oil in the vessel with the lamp, and entered into the 
joy of the Lord. 

Poor creatures some of them were, who could give 
no reason why they should hold on so and stay strong 
in God, any more than the fountain can give a reason 
for its flowing, or the plant you find in the desert for 
the store of cool water in its heart. They also had 
been sending down roots deep and far, tapping the 
springs of the reserves, storing up the oil; and then, 
when the evil day came, nothing could exhaust them of 
their faith. The old Bible had been drawn on for the 



The Parable of the Reserves 



65 



reserves, and many another fountain, and, above all, 
the inward and ever-flowing fountain of God's own 
life; and, when we do this, there is no peril of the 
oil giving out. It burns clear and strong unto the 
eternal life beyond the veil. 

Or the still sadder doom may come of shattered 
hope and a heart like a stone. No haunting any 
more of the light of a new dawn. No warm pulse 
toward earth or heaven. Cold ashes only where the 
fire was, and no more fuel. Dead already, while I 
still have a name to live. Paralysis in the centres 
of the soul, — the saddest sight in all the world. The 
surmise that things can be no worse, and I don't care, 
just dead hopes, heedless of anything life can give me 
beyond the dead line. This may come to me when 
there is no oil in the vessel with the lamp, hopes 
which rest only on the things which perish in the 
using, and a love which has never penetrated beyond 
the senses. 

There are no reserves in a life like this to meet the 
demand. I must still be able to fall back on what is 
unseen and eternal, or here and now I cannot enter 
into the light and joy. The men and women you find 
in this sore strait and stress are of those to whom 
what we call a good time is the great purpose of their 
life. But the cry comes, we must all answer, The 
oil is not forthcoming; and here on the earth is the 
end. They wist not that these cannot be the final 
conditions of our faith and hope and love, that there 
is a soul within the senses to which we must cleave. 
No reserves are laid up in these shallow, hand-to- 



66 



The Parable of the Reserves 



mouth ways; and so at last it is as if we heard 
Azrael, the angel, cry, "Put out the light, and then 
— put out the light." But the men and women 
whose faith and hope send down roots into the 
unseen and eternal, and whose love, while it fills 
the eyes with light and the ear with music, still 
loves the vision more than the sight, — and the soul 
time cannot alter save to make more beautiful, or 
death touch except to glorify, — these do not turn 
hard and cold, and say, I will hope and love no more. 
There is oil in the vessel with the lamp; and heaven 
and earth may pass away, but the reserves shall not 
pass away. 

But there is still another word. We think of those 
poor damsels turning away from the closed doors, but 
still saying, as they go home: We have learned our 
lesson. We w411 never be caught again. We will 
see to the reserves henceforth, and enter with the 
rest into the light and joy. It is but the suggestion 
of the way the infinite tender pity and love must open 
toward hapless human souls left down here in the 
dark, — the faith we love to cherish who dare, that 
life is a school in which we learn by failing as well 
as by succeeding; the faith that no man need sit 
down in despair even here, and say. That was my last 
chance, or have those who care for him say. What he 
was down here he will be forever. I can tolerate no 
such conception of the love of God. Only this can 
be true, I say, that our extremity is the divine oppor- 
tunity, no matter where we are; and, when one door 
shuts, another opens, is as good an axiom heaven- 



The Parable of the Reserves 6/ 

ward as it ever can be earthward. We must submit 
to the sorrow and loss; but we shall learn the lesson, 
and enter at last into the joy. 

The battle-cry of the regiment when they must 
again face the foe was the name of a fight which had 
covered them with shame and confusion of face; and, 
when this new day closed, they had burned out the dis- 
grace, set the smoke of the old shame itself ablaze by 
their valor, came home with the light burning high and 
clear, and were met with great sobs of joy by men 
who thought they had forgotten the secret of tears. 
And we can all do this, by God's help and blessing, so 
that no man need despair here; while this is the 
grander and diviner truth, — that no man will be per- 
mitted to despair hereafter, when he has well learned 
the lesson of the oil in the vessel with the lamp. 



INSTANTANEOUS PHOTOGRAPHS. 



"As the appearance of a flash of lightning." — Ezekiel i. 14. 

I WENT on an evening, some time ago, to see a 
great wonder in one of our public halls. It was a 
collection of photographs taken on the turn of an in- 
stant, when we gathered in our city for a centennial 
celebration. They were flashed for us here against 
a great white curtain, as you know ; and there was a 
pleasant comment touching each of them in its turn by 
one of our artists whose words on such themes I always 
love to hear. 

And the object and subject that evening were both 
well fitted to draw such an audience, if that was all we 
cared for, to match the pictures on the curtain with 
those which had caught our eye that day, have them 
bring all things to our remembrance, and then to won- 
der whether this flash through which the thing was 
done can make the shadows abide, so that, when an- 
other hundred years have come and gone, those who 
are living then will be able to gather as we did and 
see once more the great panorama on land and water 
which vanished for us in the watching. 

To do this, and then to think of the words they will 
still be reading then, '*The fashion of this world passeth 



Instmitaneotis Photogi^aphs 



69 



away," but still to say, The heavens abide, and the earth 
and man ; to smile at some things they will see, and, 
it may be, weep at some ; to see here and there a face 
they seem to know, as my old friend saw one in his 
audience, when he was preaching away out on the prai- 
ries in the West, — a face which haunted him through 
all the sermon as that of a familiar friend who had long 
ago gone to her rest ; to come down when the sermon 
was over, and say to the woman, If I did not know Mary 
had been in heaven so many years, I should be ready 
to believe she was here to-day, and she answered, I 
am Mary of the third generation, — this was my 
thought as I sat in the hall that evening, watching the 
lights and shadows those deft and cunning hands had 
caught and held for us ; but still the greater wonder lay 
within the passing show. What can be so fleeting as 
these on the water and in the sky on that April day ? 
They were caught and held in these pictures, never 
abiding and never returning, just as they were that mo- 
ment, to endure for a time we have not yet measured. 
So "who knoweth the way of a ship on the sea.^" 
the ancient wisdom asks ; and here was one answer. 
These ships were caught and held for us, with their 
flags flying in the wind, with the smoke pouring from 
their guns, with the sailors on the cross-trees and the 
citizens on deck. And on the land as on the water 
here was the same wonder: we were caught and held, 
as the clouds were in the sky, and the curl on the 
waves and the spray. The look in your eyes was there, 
and the turn of your hand on its errand to your com- 
rade, or friend. The remark was on your lips, and the 
smile on your face, or the frown : only I saw no frown 



70 



Listantaneoiis Photographs 



that I remember in the whole succession of the pict- 
ures. The foot was arrested tiptoe in the mihtary step 
where five hundred marched as one. The banners 
were flying in the wind again, and the shadows chased 
the lights. The music was in the air : you could 
almost feel the reverberation, as the deaf do. There it 
was ; and we were there caught and held, to appear on 
the white curtain while these things endure : — 

" The passing show, the fair spring morn, 
The streets, the trees, the blossomed thorn, — 
These, and far greater things, but caught 
Like these, and to the curtain brought 
The outward semblance made to give 
Enduring life to those that live. 
And, choosing each his moment well. 
Shadow and light their story tell.*' 

Done in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, there 
we were, — in our royal youth, in our white age, in our 
habit as we lived that day, and with the life on our lips 
and in our eyes. The passing of an instant, and all 
unawares the picture of a century taken *'as the ap- 
pearance of a flash of lightning." 

But I have said the greater wonder to me lay within 
the passing show, as it opened then and since then, 
and asked this question. May there not be a good and 
true lesson for us all in this which was and is now no 
more save as it is cast against the curtain.^ — an inti- 
mation of the way our lives may be caught in a picture 
or in a gallery of them, our fellows will bend over in a 
tender pride or in a sore dismay long after we have 
done with it all and gone our ways. We walk through 



Instantaiteous Photographs 



71 



this world and life, or stand and gaze, with no more 
thought of this befalling us than we had that day ; take 
our place in the great procession of life and time each 
one, and then in a moment the delicate silvered glass is 
made ready for us in some human spirit, the light flashes 
on it, the slide goes home, and there we stand. There 
we stand with the leer in our eyes, or the look in 
them God's angels love to see ; and, with the ban or 
the benediction on our lips, the very essence of what 
we are is caught and hidden away, and the work is 
done. We should make up a face and fall into a post- 
ure if we could but be aware of what was coming ; but 
this can never be. This watcher wants the man or 
woman within all the masks. So he bides his time, takes 
the picture and hides it away ; and then the time may 
come when it will be cast against the great while cur- 
tain, so that all who care to look shall see the real man 
or woman. 

Nor can I think this is some mere freak of my own 
imagination, when I explore the treasure-trove of such 
pictures taken through all time, and notice how one 
swift flash, ''as the appearance of a flash of lightning," 
is about all we have of great numbers ; but the flash 
reveals the man or woman in their habit, as they lived 
and moved and had their being. 

In our Bible — the one book in all the world to me 
which is honest as the day — it is all we have of Enoch, 
who walked with God. He has no word to say to us, 
and does nothing save this ; but I seem to want no 
more. The quiet, simple presence rises before me with 
that light in the eyes and on the face we have all seen 
in those who walk with God ; and so I do not wonder, 



72 



htstantaneoiis Photographs 



when the end comes, that it should be no end at all, but 
///^ beginning rather, as when sunset meets sunrise on 
the far North Cape on the midsummer night. 

So it is again with Lot's wife. She has no word to 
say to us, and we do not even know her name, while all 
she does is done in that supreme moment when she 
grows hard, poor soul, and bitter as the bitumen, what 
time she cannot tear herself away from her burning 
home, cannot hear the cries of her children or the 
imploring of her husband, but must linger by the wreck 
and ruin; and there in the fatal moment the picture is 
taken, and there she stands forever with the agony in 
her eyes, and becomes to the Eastern imagination a 
pillar of salt. 

So the watcher with the glass waits for the prophet 
again, who beats the dumb beast while it turns its 
speaking eyes on him in pain and wonder to plead 
against the cruel strokes. Those eyes speak forever 
now, and the man sits there forever to point a truth we 
may all take to our hearts : that even an ass in the right 
is nobler than a prophet in the wrong, and that is not 
an easy lesson for the most of us to learn, if I may make 
the guess. 

So the light flashes on Job again as he sits on the 
ashes of his harried home, and moans out his marvellous 
monologues of providence, foreknowledge, will, and 
fate." There he is forever with the pained and per- 
plexed soul in him laid bare, and somehow we do not 
care much for him in the years that come before or 
after : this is the accepted time for the picture. It 
flashes on Miriam as she stands with her hands lifted, 
striking the timbrels and singing her grand song of 



Instantaneous Photographs 



71 



deliverance from the hosts and the sea; and on Deb- 
orah, sitting under the palm-tree judging Israel and 
imparting courage to the captain to deliver the tribes; 
while Jonah flees from duty to doom, returning from 
doom to duty to sit under the withered gourd, and be 
taught of God the great lesson of his loving-kindness 
and tender mercy to those that know not their right 
hand from their left. 

It flashes frequently on David, who was so many 
men in one, and so sends down many portraits, — of 
the shepherd boy on the hills, singing his forever 
lovely psalm ; the young soldier, armed for battle with 
a stone and a sling; the hapless young husband, 
robbed of his wife ; the king in the presence of the 
prophet after the great transgression ; the heart-broken 
father mourning for his sons. Many a picture is taken 
by a flash of David, the shepherd, psalmist, soldier, 
statesman, sinner, and saint, — the man who could 
swear like a trooper and praise like a seraph, take ven- 
geance out of the Lord's hands into his own, to see how 
his curses came down on his own head and his sins 
turned to serpents by his own hearthstone, to find 
nothing of any worth at last but penitence for his sin, 
the infinite pity and love of God, and a manful striving 
after a better life. Turn where we will in the Bible, 
we are sure to find our sun pictures gleaming and burn- 
ing with the life they must reveal. Beautiful or base, 
it makes no matter to the honest old book and the 
sensitive silvered glass, while time only brings out into 
sharper relief the divine or infernal lights and shadows 
his tooth can do nothing to destroy or mar. 

And in the life which draws us nearer home, when 



74 



Instantaneous Photographs 



we turn from that little nook of the world, in parable or 
story, we still find these pictures which reveal the man 
or woman whole and, as we say, '^all there." The light 
flashes on the matchless old Greek in his prison, rub- 
bing the poor limb from which the fetter has been 
shorn away, what time he holds high converse with his 
friends, while the cup he must drink presently to his 
death stands there on the table, — he sits in the light 
forever. And on the good Alfred, the Saxon, by his 
mother's knee, bending in wonder over the beautiful 
Gospels ; in the herdsman's hut, musing over his woe- 
stricken kingdom while the cakes burn he should have 
minded, and the good housewife gives him a piece of 
her mind, — not true, you say: then, I answer, it ought 
to be, and so it is^ — Alfred stealing into the camp of 
the heathen, where those that had desolated his people 
required of him a song; stealing out again to call his 
England to arms, restoring peace to the kingdom, 
establishing the churches, enriching the schools, mak- 
ing his land and ours shine with law and order, with 
devoutness and scholarship, and then going to his rest. 
We have many pictures of Alfred : they reveal the 
manifold man. He wist not it would be so; but the 
lights were flashing here and yonder that the pictures 
might be done for all the ages to see, and he did not 
care. Why should he ? Alfred was safe. 

And on Bruce, the king, rising from his couch of 
straw in the barn, when the spider succeeds at the four- 
teenth trial, to go forth to try again and make his Scot- 
land free at Bannockburn. On John Knox in the 
presence of the queen and her minions, hurling at them 
the thunderbolts of his righteous wrath. On Cromwell 



Instantaneotis Photographs 



75 



at Dunbar and Marston Moor, and in the presence of 
the derelict commons growling, Take that bauble away. 
^ On Luther, standing to his answer at Worms, and cry- 
ing, I cannot do otherwise, so help me God ! On 
Wesley, standing on his father's gravestone to ring out 
the glad tidings when they had barred the doors of the 
church. And on Channing, hastening to the Court 
House in Boston to sit down beside the man they had 
dragged through the streets of the great free city — the 
mother city of our freedom — because he would break 
the yoke of the slave. And on John Brown, staying 
to kiss the little child as he marches to the gallows 
with his heart as high as on the day he went to his 
wedding. 

On Mary Ware, the lovely sister of our faith, at Dar- 
lington, in Durham, not caring for her errand to see the 
great motherland, but staying her feet that she might 
nurse the poor creatures in their fever-stricken homes. 
And Florence Nightingale, standing before those doors 
in the Crimea bolted fast with red tape, while the men 
were dying for food and medicine, and saying quietly, 
Bring the axes, and cut down those doors." And on 
Mother Bickerdyke, we knew so well, in the West, 
kindling her fires in the roar of the battle to make soup 
and coffee for **her boys*'; and, when one in command 
said, *'Who ordered you to make those fires .J^" an- 
swered, ''God Almighty, sir," and went on with her 
work for the boys, blessing and blest. 

There they stand in the wider world and life we 
know of, never suspecting again the presence of the 
wonderful silvered glass. Then the slide moves, the 
light flashes, the thing is done ; and the man or woman 



76 



Instant an e OILS Photographs 



is taken to stand against the great white curtain of 
time. Taken for a few years, it may be, or a century, 
or a millennium, we cannot tell, only that, as in this 
prophet's vision, the living creatures ran and returned 
as a flash of lightning ; and the rings of the wheels 
were full of eyes. 

And so the truth stands for us, all I would love to 
tell this morning. These lives of ours, also, are not 
so much a chronicle, when we reach the heart of the 
mystery, as a picture or a succession of pictures taken 
in *'a term as brief as the wave's poise before it breaks 
in foam," and then hidden away in some human heart 
or memory, so that I shall never suspect this was done 
to me for honor or shame. 

Unaware of it as the lark was Shelley heard singing 
far up in the heavens ; but he sings forever now. He 
can never be silent until the great and beautiful genius 
which caught him on the wing has passed away into 
nothingness and night. Unaware of it as the good 
parson of a town was, or the poor wydowe in a poor 
cottage," standing in a dale, in Chaucer's matchless 
gallery, there they stand, fresh and fair, after five hun- 
dred years have come and gone. 

So, indeed, it is true, as the Master says, there is 
nothing secret which shall not be revealed or hidden 
which shall not be made known ; while these pictures 
taken of us, as I said, have nothing to do with my 
posturing or contriving about the way I shall look 
when I am cast against the white curtain. The living 
creatures which come and go and flash the lightning 
take the man unmasked. I may be destined to live in 
some obscure corner and die there ; but, as surely as I 



Instantaneous Photographs 



77 



live and die, I have stood for my picture, — my picture, 
which will be noble or base as I am myself, or be 
blended of both as I am myself, or as he was who sang 
the great psalms of the ages, so that those who possess 
the likeness will say, as Father Taylor said of Webster 
when he was dead, He was hardly good enough to 
keep, but too good to throw away/' Neither for good 
nor evil can I live my life and escape the sensitive sil- 
vered glass, or, as we hear men say sometimes, cover 
my tracks. These, in the solemn issues of my life and 
yours, are like those footprints of the birds caught in 
the soft mud, it may be, a hundred thousand years ago. 
The slime hardened into rock, the rock sank and rose 
again ; and now the master restores the bird, they tell 
me, from the footprint in the rock. 

But, in touching this truth, I must not forget another 
I saw in those pictures that night, as they were cast 
against the great white curtain. I saw no evil look on 
any face, so far as I now remember, or hateful smirk 
of boundless self-conceit, which seems to take posses- 
sion of the world, and make of God our tame confed- 
erate, purveyor of our appetites." Many of them were 
anything but comely, and some were ploughed and 
scarred ; but they were at their best and not at their 
worst, and so I caught the truth on the wing that, while 
I cannot cheat these watchers, they cannot cheat me 
and make me seem worse than I am, if I seem no bet- 
ter. So, if there is a real grain of good in me, this is 
what they have to wait for and watch for, as the mother 
watches her wayward son, or the wife her husband, or 
the friend his friend. They wait for the moment when 
the good overmasters the evil, when the soul of good- 



78 



InstantaiicoiLs PJiotog7'afhs 



ness in things evil comes up to breathe : then the light 
flashes on us as the appearance of a flash of lightning, 
and we go our ways, unaware of w^hat was done ; but 
the picture is there in their heart, all right. It is the 
loyalty of heaven and the angels of the burning wheels 
to the poor grains of worth in the dust and chaff, and I 
may be winnowed down to that; but there is the tiny 
store of the good seed of the kingdom, there the bit of 
real gold within the dross. 

It was about all there was in Peter once on a time, 
and in the woman who wept at His feet who was so 
good to her and gracious ; but the great divine heart in 
him saw the gold within the dross, and what he saw 
God sees. So I must not be disheartened or over-fear- 
ful that, in the bitter battle between what the apostle 
calls the law in my members and the law in my mind, 
I shall have to stand as the evil one, if there is any 
heart in me of real striving for the divine image and 
likeness, or that these watchers with the silvered glass 
are w^aiting round a corner somewhere to take me at 
my worst, to flash the light on me then alone, and say, 
This is the man, or this the woman. In all the world 
and all time you shall find this to be true, and we can 
almost say this only : that in our human life, as in other 
treasures, w^e love best to find the gold in the dross and 
shard; and so on this ground also we may gladly be- 
lieve that the dogma of our total human depravity is a 
grosser affront to Heaven than it can be to you and me. 
I would not tamper with the evil things, the sins and 
shames, God knows, or call black white in their in- 
terest. We must hate sin in all its incarnations, and 
be sure that only fools make a mock at sin. But here 



InsiaJtianeoiis Photographs 



79 



is the truth we should always remember : that in God's 
great garden, which lies outside all the fences we have 
to make and maintain, that the fairest and best may 
bloom and ripen, there is not one worthless weed, — 7iot 
one. And so I was glad to hear the low, sweet note of 
the gospel of nature, shall I say, in the word of a very 
noble woman, one day, who said she loved to watch the 
exquisite color, when the spring comes, of what we 
call a skunk cabbage. There was beauty and grace 
for her in a thing like that. But all the more is this 
truth to be taken to heart when we give our heart to 
all goodness and truth. We may feel sad, then, and 
weary, and say : What is the use } it is as w^hen wheat 
is sown on the granite. It is not true the picture 
is taken strong and clear on the hearts prepared to 
receive it, and cast in God's good time against the 
white curtain. We are " children of the light and the 
day." 

Are you standing true to your trust, then, for the 
nobler picture, — you men and women, you merchants 
and men of affairs, artists, artisans, teachers, learners, 
lone men, lone women, mothers in the home, and fathers } 
Believe me, it is all right. There are galleries of you 
in the good human heart, taken at your best and all 
unawares ; and what others have you have. It is the 
holy law of life and of God. Yes, and there may be no 
word to hearten and inspire you. I cannot be sure 
about that. Or you may tread the wine-press alone, 
and another may drink the wine. I do not know about 
that. But your faith in life, in the truth, in goodness, 
in God, waits for the true moment; and then, all un- 
awares to us, the glass is ready, the slide shifts silently, 



8o 



Instantaneous Photographs 



and the picture is taken for blessing, when we, as we 
say so blindly, *'are no more." Every true man and 
woman is so caught and held for the world's diviner 
life. No such endeavor is only as the shadows which 
were passing over the waters and the land on that day 
of the great celebration. Some true word you say, 
some right, good thing you do, the essence of your 
very self at your best, is arrested and held as the bright 
waters were then, and the flying banners, and the sun- 
light on the presence of the great multitudes. It flashes 
the true fatherhood and motherhood on the hearts of 
the children who cannot keep a chronicle, but can only 
take impressions and pictures ; and then, in long years 
after they are done, they come out and shine on the 
white curtain in the light that never lay on land or sea, 
and so never you fear that the picture will be false if 
the life and love be true. And so may we all believe. 
The reformer who stands on the first line in the forlorn 
hope of some truth which will win the world to its 
banner ; the forlorn martyr who cannot die, and yet 
dies daily ; the faithful and true witness whose church 
counts just one member, and, as he dreams, will die 
when he dies, — these, and more than I can name in all 
the world and in all the ages, they stand against the 
white curtain, not having received the promise, but 
seeing it afar off. And in all the world and all the ages 
there they stand also, the watchers with the good silvered 
glass. The slide is shifted, the light flashes, the pict- 
ure is taken ; and the world and all our life grow more 
divine and good as we look on them cast against the 
great white curtain of time. He in whom we live and 



histantajieons Photographs 



8i 



move and have our being has not left us to wonder 
how the thing will come out ; for 



" All things once, are things forever. 
Soul once living lives forever. 
Blame not what is only once, 
When that once endures forever. 
Love once felt, though soon forgot, 
Moulds the heart to good forever." 



I 



THE LOW-LYING LIGHTS. 



" Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good 
works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." — Matt. v. i6. 

I. We may easily see — when we read this Sermon 
we think of as the sum of all true preaching — that the 
preacher has no w^ord to say about the church we shall 
join, the system of doctrine w^e shall embrace, or the 
things we shall do that we may think of as essential 
in ordinance and observance before this light he speaks 
of can shine forth in and from our life. 

And this was by no means because they were all 
of one mind in old Jewry any more than we are now 
about such things; for we need not stray outside the 
Gospels to learn that they had their diverse sects also. 
There were not so many of them, to be sure, — four 
perhaps, all told, or five with the Samaritans. Yet he 
takes no notice here of any sect, but only of the light 
which may shine from within them, no matter where 
they may belong. 

And, because there were sects among them, these 
had their systems of belief and of ordinance and usage 
on which they rested and turned. They were ortho- 
dox and liberal, high church and low, conservative and 
come-outer, with no more aptitude to blend and be one 
than we have now; but he has no word to say about 



The LoW'lyijig Lights 



83 



the need there is to accept this system or that before 
this light can shine he thinks of as the essential thing 
to mind. It can shine through them all, if they are 
sincere and true to the light as the light is to them, 
or apart from them all, if the light which is in them 
be darkness. 

They had their famous preachers also, and teachers, 
then as we have now, — the men who had split a prism 
from the great white shaft of the eternal truth of God, 
and inserted it for a glass in their souls* windows, 
through which the light that was in them must shine, 
dark and lurid or sweet and fair ; but he does not say. 
You shall go to them, and light your lamp there, 
because it is within them lighted already, in a glim- 
mer or a glory, and what they have to do is to let it 
shine. 

They were very simple folk, also, he had about him, 
in the main, — poor men, of a very limited education 
and attainment ; and, if he had asked them what they 
believed and why, they would most likely have stam- 
mered and blundered, and got the statement twisted all 
out of true on their uncouth and rustic tongues the 
moment they strayed beyond the things they had 
learned by rote in the school and synagogue. 

Yes ; and very likely would have mixed up the Bible 
truth with some of the common currency, just as such a 
man quoted the words from the Bible to me a good 
many years ago, God tempers the wind to the shorn 
lamb," and, when I said. That is not in the Bible, rumi- 
nated for a while, and then answered, " Well, if it isn't, 
it ought to be,'' and to that I said. Amen. 

It is well worth our while to notice also that this 



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Tlie Loiv-lying Lights 



gracious monition was given to men, and no doubt 
to women, too, who would be so full of care about their 
day's work of some sort, and their daily bread, that 
beyond the simple faith which would lie within the life 
they were living, and the work they were doing on the 
land and water and in their homes, there would be no 
light in them save this, perhaps: that they must do as 
they would be done by, and fall back, for the rest, on 
some such heart of grace as that we find in good Dolly 
Winthrop in the story, — *'Ah! there's a deal o' trouble 
in this world. Master Marner, and things we can never 
make out the rights on ; and all we can do, then, is to 
trust, — to do the right thing so far as we know, and to 
trust. For, if us as knows so little can see a bit o' 
good and right, we may be sure there's a good and a 
bigger rights nor what we can know. And it's the will 
o' Them above as many things should be dark to us; 
but there's some things as I've never felt i' the dark 
about, and they're mostly what comes i' the day's work/' 
So they must think of what they had to do in this 
world, and put their life into that day by day and all 
the year round, or they could not keep the home 
together, and pay their way like honest men and good 
women. 

And, in doing this, who should know better than he 
did who was talking with them, and had lived in a home 
like theirs all his life, what a hard struggle it would be 
not seldom to make ends meet, and drive the wolf from 
the door in those evil and desperate times 1 How the 
light which was in them would be darkened by clouds of 
fear, when the harvest was scant and poor, and the 
lord of the land ruthless for his rent, when sickness 



The Low-lying Lights 



85 



invaded the home, and it grew dark in the shadows of 
death, when the fishing was naught on the Sea of Gali- 
lee, or the boat lay a wreck on the beach with the father 
and sons down within the wild waters, while the widow 
and children that were left wept for the sore desolation! 
This he knew because he knevv^ what was in man and a 
man's life, and because he had lived in the heart of it 
for thirty years, and had seen the pathetic sight he 
touches in a parable, where the poor house-mother finds 
her sixpence lost in the mud floor, and rushes out, cry- 
ing to the neighbors and friends, Rejoice with me, for 
I have found the piece which was lost." All this he 
knew, — the preacher with the divine heart and the light 
in it which has grown to be the glory of the world. 
Yet he said to them, yoitr light so shine before men 
that they may glorify your Father which is in heaven. 
And so this light, if we have caught his meaning, 
is not of a sect or system or a say-so of any sort. It is 
there by the ordination of God, striving to shine forth 
through the thick encrustations that overlay the soul's 
windows, or shining strong and clear from clean and 
strong souls ; but, whatever may be the estate of the 
glass, there is the light, and they must let it shine. 

II. And so it is once more that when, for my soul's 
sake, I read this word of the Master as it stands, clear 
from the conditions we make for the shining now, — 
that we shall believe this or that, as it is set forth in 
the diverse books, and do this or that we are bidden to 
do, or the light which is in us will be not light, but 
darkness, — I still hear the voice of Him who spake as 
never man spake beside, saying : Let not your heart be 
troubled about these contentions, over This is the 



86 



TJie Low4ying Lights 



false " and ''That is the true," which vexed the world 
in my time as it vexes the world in yours. There is 
the light within you which was within me, — the light 
which cometh down from heaven. Now let it shine. 
It may be hard for you to keep the glass clear always, 
— mine was not clear always, — but mind the light. 
And there may be those who will say of you what 
they said of me, — that your light is not from heaven, 
but from the pit. Let them say what they will, let it 
shine. This is what you are here for, — to reveal the 
light which is in you ; and you may think it is of no 
use and no one cares, while there are always those 
who love the darkness rather than the light, and they 
may hate you for the shining as they hated me. But 
you must be true to the shining all the same. 

The argument which goes right home to the heart 
where all words fail is the argument of the light shining 
clear through the windows of sincere and true souls, — 
yours or mine, — when we keep the glass sweet and fair. 
Then, as I listen again, I see that gracious look my 
holy preacher casts on those who hear him, and still 
note the emphasis he hides in the words 'Met light 
shine" ; and then it is as if he had said to them what 
he would say to us also. You will go home from hear- 
ing this word of mine to your fishing and farming, your 
vines and olives, and flocks of sheep, or your business 
in the town over yonder; and for the most of you this 
is all you can do, or ever will do, while you live on the 
earth. And now the truth I would tell you is this : 
that you can let your light so shine there on the land 
or the water, in your homes and in the business you 
have to mind, that you may live and pay your way, like 



The Low-lying Lights 



8^ 



honest men and true, and good women and true, — so 
shine that there shall be a divine worth in it for the 
world you live in and for all time to come; and then 
the word shall be said to you when your work is done: 
^'Well done, thou good and faithful servant! enter 
thou into the joy of thy Lord." Very little you may 
be able to do, as you think of it, beyond what you must 
take hold of to-morrow, and the kindly and neighborly 
service, also, which comes with the day by day. But 
this world and your life, these are in our Father's 
hands as surely as the innermost and the uttermost 
heavens are; and you serve him then as surely as the 
angels of the presence which stand about the throne. 
Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men 
should do unto you, do ye even so unto them. This 
is the law and the prophets. And if ye, being evil, 
know how to give good gifts unto your children, how 
much more shall your Father in heaven give good 
things to them that ask him! — this is your faith. 
And behold the fowls of the air, who sow not, nor 
reap, nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father 
feedeth them ; while not a sparrow falleth to the 
* ground without his will, and ye are more than many 
sparrows, — this is your trust. And blessed are the 
lowly of heart, and blessed those that mourn, and 
blessed the meek, and blessed the merciful, and blessed 
the pure in heart, for they shall see God, — these are 
your beatitudes. And a good tree cannot bear evil 
fruit, — this is your evidence. And now go home, and 
let your light so shine before men. 

III. So I have lingered over this great and most 
pregnant monition of the Master, as I said, because it 



88 



The Lozv-Iying Lights 



stands good for all time and comes home to us all. 
Down on the coast, this summer, I was watching a 
light from my window, when, as the word runs in my 
mother land, it was blowing great guns. It was not a 
great light, like the Minot on that coast and that on 
Sandy Hook our way, but a hand fed the lamp we 
never see and always see, — the hand of the republic 
and the day's man of the republic was within the small, 
sturdy tower. And, as the sun went down, the light 
flashed out ; and at midnight, as I turned away from 
the window, there was the light shining clear over the 
dark waters. Then I said. This is not something for 
the man in the tower there to talk about, but something 
to do, — to stand true to the light ; while to let it go out 
or burn down dim, when the order is to keep it burning 
strong and clear, would be to lose his rank, and number 
as one who had proven unfaithful to his trust. 

And so I got a parable out of it all, touching this 
gracious monition in the Master's sermon, and how we 
must all mind the light, not in another's way, but in 
our own, as the day's men of God ; while it will be a 
good day for the world, a quaint old divine says, when 
we once come to the conclusion that God cares a great * 
deal more for the clear shining than he cares for what 
we say about ours being the finest and the best. And 
then is it only a low light we have to mind, not a splen- 
did glory like those we have all seen. So was that in 
the sturdy little tower on the coast ; but the man who 
had to mind it was as true to his calling and election as 
the day's man of the republic, as those are in the high 
places, and as they were on Cape Race, whose light 
on a black midnight, twenty years ago, warned us away 



The LozV'Iytng Lights 



89 



from the fatal shore. Indeed, I find that the men and 
women who are dearest to me, as the years grow from 
the few to the many, are not those who challenge the 
world to admire and praise them, but rather those v/ho 
have stood faithful to the low-lying light, as the man 
whose lamp I was watching is to those who live about 
the Bay which lay beyond my window, and who have to 
look to him for help and direction when the need 
grows sore. 

And so, as I think of these faithful in a very little, 
one comes out from the mist and silence of the years 
who has moved on these many years to the land where 
there is no more night and no more sea. He was in 
my old mother church, and always said one prayer, and 
told one very simple story, with very much endeavor 
to get it out, about what lay in his heart, while we all 
knew it word for word before he began. And, then, no 
matter who was the preacher, he would go quietly to 
sleep, as a child will, the moment we gave out our text, 
and sleep right through the sermon ; while even in the 
prayer-meetings, when the rest were very wide-awake 
indeed, he v/ould go to sleep, and wake up now and 
then to say Amen. But, if in all the world he could 
have found an enemy, — a thing you could not imagine, 
— he could not have got one other man to believe that 
old George was not sincere and true as the saints of 
God are ; while he was the one man everybody ran to 
in their troubles, and would be likely, as they ran, to 
meet him half-way, coming to look them up and help 
them. He was not a rich man; but his hand and heart 
were always open, and his time seemed to belong to all 
the folk within hail of his home. Managing small 



90 



The Low-lying Lights 



estates for widows and orphans ; the president of the 
temperance cause in the valley, where in the meeting 
the speech he never did quite make touched you more 
potently, when you knew the man, than the choicest 
eloquence of other men ; and the wildest fellows in the 
shops would be ready to sign any pledge when he would 
look at them out of his soft brown eyes, and plead with 
them that they should quit drinking with such a tender 
pathos that they would break into tears and swear 
mighty oaths they would drink no more, and then ask 
him to forgive the swearing. And George had a pony 
he had raised himself and trained, so resolute to have 
his own way, and stop when it pleased him-, that the 
president of the society down the street would have 
told him, I think, to try the w4iip. Ah ! but the light 
shone so clear in the good old heart and life, and 
he stood by it so loyally through the eighty years, 
hearing and heeding the monition to keep the glass 
clear, and mind the light in the low-standing tower. 
In his work on the farm and his worship in the old 
meeting-house, his visitings of the fatherless and the 
widows in their affliction, his oversight of whatsoever 
things were true and lovely and of a good report, and 
his good hospitable heart, and merciful and tender, this 
was how the light shone for us all, and made good the 
divine monition. 

IV. So, as I read the words again and think of the 
light I saw in the summer athwart the Bay, I can see 
how the truth opens we may all take to our hearts about 
the low-lying light. 

It may shine, first of all, on the work we have to do 
in this world, where we are all coworkers together with 



The Low-lying Lights 



91 



God on this work ; and when from it, when we create and 
do not destroy true wealth and worth, as workmen who 
need not to be ashamed. In the bonnie greenlands I 
love to find where I may, far from this busy city, there 
is not the least need, I notice, for me to sit down with 
the husbandmen, and ask them what light they can 
shed on fair and true farming : the light lies on the 
farms, or the shadows, wherever I go. On the grass in 
the meadows, and the growing corn ; on the trees in 
the orchards and the flowers in the door-yard the mother 
and daughters tend, and on the sweet and simple home- 
steads,— on these the light tells the story, and on those 
where the light is darkness, and must struggle through 
the glass encrusted by sloth or worse, set forth in the 
squalor and neglect. It is the simplest truth we can 
take to our hearts when we begin where the Master 
began for proof and evidence in the low-lying light. It 
shines on the farm and the workshop, and on all we 
have to do, no matter how near it may lie to the base 
line of our life, and no matter how high it may reach 
toward the stars ; and here men may see our good 
works, and glorify our Father which is in heaven. So 
is it hand work 1 Very well. Or work the world calls 
noble.? Very well. Or humble .? Very well. The day's 
work of the carpenter's son, Cyprian reports, at ox 
yokes and ploughs Very well. Or this Sermon on the 
Mount 1 Still very well. Here is the law and the testi- 
mony he made good in his own life, that we shall mind 
the light where our life lies and our work in this world. 

And, again, we shall do this for our own sakes, be- 
cause, as the hand we never see and always see clasps 
the oil, the glass, and the flarae the man must mind in 



1 



92 



The Low-lying Lights 



that low-lying light-house on the coast, or he loses his 
rank and number, so we must let our light shine, 
God's hand clasps lest we lose ours. And, as the man 
ordained by the Republic to mind the light can never 
quite tell what worth lies in the clear shining, no more 
can we, save by faith in his faithful endeavor and as we 
stand true to this trust. 

If my dear old friend could have dreamed that forty 
years and more from the time we first met I should 
pay my poor tribute to the low-lying light which shone 
for us to the end of the vears, he would have said : What 
am I doing worth a moment's mention or memory ? 
I cannot help it, there is no merit in it : I am only 
doing that which it is my duty to do. But I must have 
answered, Old friend, you are seeing to the lamp and 
keeping the glass clean and fair, you are standing true 
to the light ; and it is not for you to know what worth 
lies in your steadfastness and truth. 

" Lives of great men all remind us 
We can make our lives sublime.'' 

It is not for us a question of greatness, but of faith- 
fulness to the Master s word. 

So I have read of one who was left alone in some 
tower with a flashing light where the machinery broke 
down, and the darkness came on, and the storm. Then 
he saw what he must do : he must contrive some rude 
purchase which would still flash the light. And there 
he stood all night, turning the thing at such cost that, 
when the relief came in the morning, he had fallen 
down, done almost to death with the terrible strain. 
But, when they asked him how he could do it, — this 



Tlie Low -lying Lights 



93 



work which would be heavy for two strong men, — he 
answered, ''I thought of them out there in the storm 
and darkness looking toward my light, and how they 
would need it to save them ; and then I knew I must 
mind the light, live or die. So I cried, 'God help me 
to help them out yonder,' and stood to it until the day 
broke and the sun came up out of the sea." And so I 
stand here to tell you the best I know ; but it is only 
as when one playeth upon an instrument some 
pleasant or sad tune, if I have to say, with a poor 
old man I heard of, Mind the light, and let the lantern 
go, when the lantern and the light are each essential, 
— the man and the word. Are you in the store, then, or 
the workshop, the market or on the farm, in the home, 
in the study, in the studio, in the school } Is it a poem 
through which the light will shine, a picture, a book, a 
lesson, an invention, a ledger, a wagon-wheel, a horse 
well shod, a stone wall, a business that touches both 
the poles, everything, anything which creates and does 
not waste and destroy } Labor is prayer. The light 
shines in and from what we do, when the loyal heart is 
in it, and the faithful hand ; and the Lord and Master 
only set his seal on the divine sermon as it stands 
in the Gospels for all men to read, because he made 
the truth he tells, and the light that shines in and 
through it all on the noblest and best we can be and 
do, real to us, and true as the way, the truth, and the 
life. Or do we say, finally, I am of this sect or the other, 
a follower of Fox, the apostle of this inward light, or 
Wesley or Channing.^^ Well enough, I answer; but, if 
that is all, you are only a reflector of another man's 
light, and, good as this may be, it is not the best. 



94 



The Low-lying Lights 



The best for you is yours, the best for me is mine, 
if I look to the lamp, and keep clean and fair the 
glass. This light which shone so strong and clear 
from the Master's heart as he sat on the hillside, and 
still shines so strong and clear, came to him from the 
fountain of light, the Father of lights, the primal source, 
the sun which lights the suns and tips the glow-worm 
with its lambent lamp, and thence comes our light, or 
should come ; and we only follow him truly herein when 
we follow him to the fountain, the Father, the eternal, 
im.mortal, and invisible, who is light, and in him is no 
darkness at all. Amen. 



THE CITY LIETH FOUR-SQUARE. 



" The city lieth four-square, and the length is as large as the breadth. 
The length and the breadth and the height are equal." — Rev. xxi. i6. 

It was the holy city the seer saw coming down out 
of heaven from God, where the noble should dwell, 
and gentle, the clean and true; and these should 
come from the east and west, the north and south, 
and enter within the gates, which stand open always 
for their welcome. And the city had no need of 
the sun, for the glory of God did lighten it; and 
standeth four-square, and her gates open every way, 
and he foretells how the nations shall walk in the 
light of it, and the kings of the earth shall bring 
their glory and honor into it. It is a vision of the 
commonwealth of God he sees through the lurid 
smoke and flame, where we may all dwell who are of 
this heart and mind, no matter whence we come, 
what may be our name, or from what direction we may 
come, — east or west, north or south. If this is what 
we bring with us, — nobleness and gentleness, sincer- 
ity and truth of the heart and purpose, — we can enter, 
then, and sit down together in the heavenly place, and 
be citizens of the commonwealth of God. 

But, as I muse over the vision so large and fair and 



96 



The City lieth Fo7i7'-sqita7'e 



all-enfolding, I have to wonder how many of us dwell 
there now, or are near indeed to the ever-open gates, as 
I notice how we still stand aloof, and call each other 
names not seldom that sting and burn, because those 
who cannot think as vv^e do have come from some 
other direction toward the holy city, and are not one 
with us in opinion or usage. It makes no great mat- 
ter, then, how true they may be, and sincere. They 
are still of one brand, while we are of another; and 
so it is hard for us even to imagine that their claim 
can be as good as ours to be fellow-citizens with the 
saints. They must come on the same line as this we 
take, and be able to give about the same account of 
their journey, or else they must be counted of a poorer 
quality, as in the markets they grade their wheat as 
one, two, and three; so those of us who count our- 
selves number one feel we must not be mixed up with 
two and three, or the whole worth of what we stand for 
will come into peril. We must keep up the standard; 
and we mean by this the beliefs and usages which are 
most nearly like our own, with only a slight regard 
for the large and fair lines of this noble vision. Not 
to be of our "domination," as a good woman in Kansas 
called her sect once, w^hen we talked of these things, 
is to take a lower place in these questions of the out- 
look and insight of the soul touching the holy 
city; and none of us are free from this feeling, 
or, it may be, can be free. You can find it among 
the Baptists, where my dear mother belonged, and 
the Methodists, where I belonged long ago, among 
the Unitarians, and in the High Church and the Low; 



The City lieth Foitr-square 



97 



while your Quaker nourishes the feeling as surely 
as your Catholic that the true way is this we take 
toward the city of God, and the true side is this on 
which we enter. 

But now is not this true, first of all, that, when we 
turn from the faith we hold under many names to the 
life we share as citizens of the republic, we manage to 
do a good deal better than this by those who come here 
to seek their fortunes and make their home? These 
come to us from far and wide, and about all we care 
for is that they shall be good men and good citizens. 
They may come from the east, then, with its history, 
or from the west, with its prophecy, from the hard- 
headed north or the warm-hearted south; but, if they 
will only take hold of the work which is waiting to be 
done in a good and manful way, we are quite content 
to give them a good welcome. You who are of the 
old strain may be a little clannish, to be sure, and I 
think you are; but you do not let this bar the way 
finally to the wider and more gracious outflow of your 
life, and you may count us who are new-comers back 
to our race and nation, while as yet you know very 
little else about us, because this is one way, and on 
the whole a very good way, to find the lines at once 
of our worth and our limitations. Still, this is swept 
aside handsomely and well when you are once sure of 
your man, an^ find, as we say, that he is all there, and 
means to be. He may come from any direction; but 
you count this of no great moment in the exact meas- 
ure of the deepness and worth of your insight, and 
think it is a shame to discount his claim by saying, 



98 



The City lieth Fours qtiare 



Ah I but he is an Englishman, or an Irishman, or a 
German. If he is a good sterling ma7i^ one who 
weighs well in the scales of honesty, usefulness, and 
virtue, you are quite content to count him in; and, 
then, I notice that those who are of the old stock are 
ready to make ample amends for any touch of hesita- 
tion they may have felt in giving such a one the 
right hand of fellowship while as yet he was an un- 
known and untried man.* 

You may notice once more that, when we strike 
still wider lines than these, v/e are able to see where 
the worth lies of this greater and fairer judgment, and 
in a still finer light. This was one of the lessons, I 
remember, which came to me in our great centennial 
year, and also when I went to the Exposition in Paris 
two years after, in 1878. There, in each instance, 
were the noblest arts and inventions of the nations, 
east, west, north, and south, set forth in their best 
estate; and they all had this worth in them of the 
manhood which looks backward or forward, of the 
warm and fluent nature, or of that which works to 
severe and hard lines. 

So in the best work of the old eastern lands you 
could easily trace the worth of tradition and reflection 
and the spirit which goes backward, while in the best 
work of the western there were enterprise and antici- 
pation and the spirit which looks forward. And 
strong and stern work came from the north; while 
from the south came the most wonderful exuberance 
in form and color and a plastic softness, touched here 



*A'ways except when he is a Chinaman, and this is to our shame. 



The City lieth Four-square 



99 



and there with a half-savage energy or a seductive 
underplay of fancy, which was just the reflex of the 
manhood which gave us the treasure. It was to be 
seen in all the fabrics and pictures that were genuine 
transcripts of each land and race. Turn where you 
would, this was the waiting truth ; and, then, it was 
not hard to see how a completeness of beauty and 
worth lay within the whole treasure you would have 
looked for in vain, had any been left out. Take away 
reflection or anticipation, austerity or emotion, and 
you could have had no such wonders of worth and 
beauty either in the finer or the homelier arts. East, 
west, north, and south were all needed for this reve- 
lation which came to us of the best the nations can 
do; and so the city of God in the arts, I said, as I 
saw the wonder, lieth four-square, and her gates open 
every way. 

It is the truth again touching the treasure we find 
in noble books and in all the tracks of the spirit they 
reveal. Measure these by large and fair lines, and 
you find we still have to go eastward for the past and 
westward for the future, northward for cool reason and 
southward for fervid emotion; that science belongs to 
our western lands, — the promise of the future, — and 
the old sacred books to the eastern, — the treasures of 
the past, — while poetry and music were born of the 
southern heart, and pure reason and logic of the north. 

It is true, to be sure, that these qualities may mix 
and mingle in the greatest books, as indeed they do, 
so that there seems to be a confusion in them, like 
that we notice in the isothermal lines, and the winds 



lOO 



The City lietli Four-square 



which blow where they list to chill you to the bone in 
Florida when we are fainting with the heat in New 
York, or to give you a calm in the very temple of 
the winds and a cyclone in the heart of all stillness. 
The spirit which is hidden in great books, or shall we 
say in the greatest, cannot be bound as it may be in 
other ways. So your supreme books are hard and 
stern or soft and fluent, and dip backward or forward 
on grand, free lines of their own. Still, we have only 
to imagine a world full of books in which there was 
only one of these treasures to the exclusion of all the 
rest, no sacred treasures from the past or splendid 
hopes for the future, no cool reason or glowing emo- 
tion, to see how poor we should be where we are now 
so rich. They are all needed for the revelation of 
human genius in this spiritual body we call a book. 
The treasures of the past and the future must be in 
them, and words that kindle and words that cool. So 
the city of God in the human heart and intellect also 
lieth four-square, and her gates open every way. And 
as it is with the book, so it is with the man who 
speaks to us by this holy spirit, this whole spirit; for, 
wherever you find such a man, you find the incarna- 
tion of these diverse powers and gifts and this grace. 
So Isaiah and all the greater prophets find their full 
expression not in prophecy alone, but in reflection 
also; while they lay stout bolts of reason in the 
moulds into which they pour the molten gold of their 
fervid emotion. So Milton must have a "Paradise 
Lost" before he can afford us a "Paradise Regained," 
and argue of "providence, foreknowledge, will, and 



The City lieth Fotu^-square loi 

fate " between the lovely interludes of the garden and 
the first human pair. 

This is the secret also of your true orator on the 
platform or at the bar, in the Senate or the pulpit; 
and we are all at fault as we lack the power to look 
backward or forward, to bind our work well together 
with reason and logic, and to penetrate it through 
and through, when the demand is there, with the fires 
of a fervent emotion. Prophecies and Psalms, ser- 
mons on Mars' Hill or on Murray Hill, orations that 
mark an era, or lyceum talks of a man like Tyndall, — 
scan them all, and you will find these treasures in 
them in the precise measure of their perfection, — 
wealthy in anticipation as in reflection, bound well 
together by reason and logic, and threaded through 
and through with quick emotion; for this city also 
lieth four-square, and the length and the breadth and 
the height of it are equal. 

And now would it not be of all things strange to find 
that this law was of no great moment in the things 
which touch the soul's life, in religion, which is of 
such high worth in our whole life besides, or that the 
main worth in religion should lie in one of these, to 
the dwarfing and starving of all the rest? Because it is 
not hard to see how this is no mere notion of mine, but 
a revelation rather of the way the Most High takes 
with us to bring out all our powers, each holding its 
own secret of worth for us, and taking its own place 
in the perfection I would try to find. And is it not 
fair, therefore, that we should take this to be the truth 
about the religious life also, and so venture on the pre- 



102 



The City lieth Four-square 



sumption, if we can do no more just now, that, as we 
can count each of these treasures at their true worth, 
making none of them supreme over all the rest, but of 
an equal and beautiful worth all round, we shall find 
the conditions here of the truest faith and life, — a 
faith and life in which the priceless treasures of the 
past will be as dear to us as the most splendid prom- 
ise of the future, and what holy men of old have said 
as what holy men say now or will say while the world 
stands right from the fountains of the divine inspira- 
tion, while the processes of reason and logic by which 
we come to the truth of God shall by no means over- 
ride the swift intuition which catches a truth on the 
wing? And may not this revelation of the fourfold 
treasure help us to the stout and steadfast denial of 
the claims we are all so ready to make that some one 
of these treasures is really supreme in its worth, or, if 
not quite supreme, still of a worth which overshadows 
all the rest? For myself, I think it is a limitation no 
church or sect or man need be proud of, any more 
than we are proud of a limited vision or of color- 
blindness; and so, when we say that the church which 
cleaves only to the past, to the sacred books and the 
traditions and usages which have grown sacred with 
time, is the only true church, and we want no more 
and will seek no farther, it seems to me that the only 
answer to such a claim must be. This is all very good 
as far as it goes, but it only goes eastward, after all. 

Or I may say, I will believe in nothing I cannot 
reason out to the last word and accent. Well, I can 
find a very noble treasure, of truth in this way also, 



The City lieth Four-sqtiar'e 



103 



and feel sure of my ground, as far as it goes; but, 
then, I may be in peril of the rebuke Dr. Parr made to 
one who said to him, "Sir, I will believe nothing I 
cannot understand." "Then, sir," the old man an- 
swered, when he had heard him out, "your creed will 
be about the briefest I ever heard of in all my life." 
Or there may be no danger of such a rebuke, and no 
reason for it. Yet, in this wonder and mystery of our 
human life, by cleaving to my reason and logic, and 
this alone, I may become the man Wordsworth had in 
his mind as 

" One to whose smooth, rubbed soul can cling 
No form or feeling, great or small, 
A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, 
An intellectual all in all." 

And I do not come, then, toward the city of God. I 
wander away toward the polar wastes of the soul's 
divinest life. Or, again, I may give myself over to an 
intense and overmastering emotion, in which reason 
has no place, and make the past and future of no 
account save as food for my fever. Well, this fervid 
emotion has also a grand story to tell of our human 
life and history. It has set the world afire time and 
again, and burned up the dead brakes and timbers to 
make clear spaces for the new springtime of God. 
Still, emotion is only of the southward, at the best; 
and, when I have this, and nothing more, the chances 
are that I may burn myself up in my burning. And 
then the pity of it is that in the most of us there 
is not timber enough to make much of a fire. 

Do I dream again over the untold promise of the 



I04 The City lieth Four-square 

future? God forbid that I should cry this down, this 
vision of new heavens and a new earth; but v.^hat is 
it, after all, but the westward outlook of the city of 
God? Very good, I know, and quite essential in the 
wholeness of the treasure, — but that, and no more. 
For we have all known those who could find no good 
eastward or north or south of the city, who derided the 
old sacred treasures, who could not or would not rea- 
son, and kept themselves far away from the moving 
emotions which make the soul's life so fluent and 
full of grace; but they were rather apt to be of all 
men wanting, when you needed men to stand by the 
things which must be done here and now, or their 
own dream of the future, grand and great as it may 
be, can never come true. Such men hold true treas- 
ure for us all ; but, when they care for the westward 
outlook alone, to the slaying of the rest, they may 
only be like the outermost pioneers we hear of, who 
want always to push farther on when the smoke of an- 
other chimney shoots a blue thread against the far 
horizon. They can unite with no society in this com- 
monwealth of God : they can only be content with the 
wilderness; while, if they could but touch this com- 
pleteness of the city which lieth four-square, they 
might still nourish the westward look, and leave the 
world their debtor. 

It must be true, then, and no mere notion of mine, 
that no one of these grand factors in religion can ever 
be so true and good for us as the whole. The past 
holds its high worth with the future: reason is as the 
iron bolt, and emotion as the fluent life which flows 



The City lieth Four-square 105 

and flames all about it ; and, when we take this truth to 
our hearts, we can see how, in this commonwealth of 
the religious life, the tendency to take sides and pre- 
fer this that or the other is all right so long as we 
hold ourselves modestly, — as so many do, thank God, 
after all, — and find in it the motive power of the love 
which never faileth. Make this law as true in the 
commonwealth the seer saw as it is in the world's 
great commonwealth, and then it is not hard to see 
how the past holds its treasure for us all on one side, 
and the future opens its promise on another, how rea- 
son here may reign supreme in us, and there a holy 
and fervid emotion. So, while we trust we may grow 
evermore alike, we can be glad and proud, then, for 
the worth which flows from our unlikeness. And still, 
allowing that this is the best we can do for ourselves 
or, with our nature, the holy spirit of truth can do for 
us, — I speak as a man, — we can challenge each other 
to bring forth the finest fruit of our diverse endow- 
ments, and then match them in no narrow or selfish 
fashion, but that the Father may be glorified in all 
his sons and daughters. While we who may call our- 
selves liberal Christians can only be worthy the name 
as we are able to understand this diversity among 
sincere men and women of every name in the church 
of the living God we accept in nations and races and 
in the commonwealth of the arts and the intellect. 
So, while we may have to allow that three in the four 
sides may not be of our make or mind, yet in the city 
of God they all face true. 

Has my brother, then, the faith which looks east- 



io6 



The City lietJi Foiii'-square 



ward, is the past of supreme worth to him. the sacred 
books, the saintly lives, the great traditions, the old 
and deep roots of the life of God in man? Let me be 
proud of him, then, and glad for him: for he mav find 
treasure there I fail to find, and sit down with the 
patriarchs and the prophets in their kingdom. Does 
he look with those gleaming eyes only toward the fut- 
ure trying to see the things not seen as yet, and does 
he hide his manhood in his peering, does he live for 
the future, and try to make his vision good here and 
now? I say, in this way also, he is a citizen of the 
commonwealth of God; and the men of the westward 
heart and outlook find all the new worlds. Is he 
the man who will only reason and draw the truth in 
this way from the ever-flowing fountains of the life 
of God? Then woe is me again, if I fail to believe 
he dwelleth in God, and God in him. He is a worker 
in the iron of this kingdom. You will find his forge 
close by the northern gates; and, indeed, we need his 
bolts and bars always, and never more than now. 

Does he dwell by the southern gates of the city, as 
a man who could not reason if he would, and would 
not if he could, but counts his fervid emotions of more 
worth than all besides? Well, I want to knovv^ if his 
emotions are set on fire of heaven, as Melville said of 
his good comrade, John Knox. Do they burn with a 
clear flame to all divine ends and issues? We need 
such men always, and women to match them, in the 
city of God. They hold the secret in their hearts of 
the grand and true revivals which wait always for 
their advent, and preach sermons and pour out prayers 



The City lieth Foitr-square 



107 



over which we wonder after they are dead and gone, 
and say, Where lay the secret of their power to do such 
things? They seem now to be so dead; but we might 
as well wonder over the white ashes of good sound 
hickory. The substance was burned in their burning, 
but the world was melted in the fervent fires. 

So the truth stands of the solidarity — shall we say? 
— of the city which standeth four-square, in which 

" All are needed by each one ; 
Nothing is fair or good alone." 

It is the truth about the commonwealth of God and 
the city. In that wonder I mentioned, I met a good 
old man I had known many years, and a Methodist 
when I was one, who never went to sleep under my 
preaching; and so I loved him. But, when I left my 
old mother church, a film came down between our lives 
and long-enduring love, so that we could see no longer 
eye to eye. Seventeen years had passed, and here I 
found him where, for the first time since we parted, 
he greeted me like a brother. Would I let him 
show me the treasures in the great halls, and would I 
eat bread with him? The old life began to beat 
again, and we went wandering through the wonder- 
world like two brothers. He was glad and proud for 
the whole wealth which had come from everywhere, — 
east, west, north, and south, — and saw how each was 
unique, and yet part and parcel of the splendid com- 
pleteness. Then we had a talk about the old times; 
and I found the good old heart in him had grown 



io8 The City lieth Four-sqitai^e 

greater and more gracious, and he had learned some- 
thing of the truth the Master touches in his saying, 
"The children of this generation are wiser than the 
children of light." Here was a gospel for the com- 
monwealth of God from the commonwealth of man. 
He was prepared to see what we may do in the divine 
life in his joy over what had been done in the human, 
when the suggestion was made that in this, also, we 
should match the best with the best all round, and be 
glad for it all, and proud of it all, no matter what 
may be the brand or whence it may come, — glad for 
all truth-seekers and all truth-tellers, all the sincere, 
the noble, the gentle, and the faithful, and the treas- 
ures of the old and the hope of the new; and so, when 
we parted, we were closer together than we had ever 
been before in one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. 
And so it may be, and must be, finally. We h^ar the 
cry going forth far and wide that not creed, but char- 
acter, is the standard by which men must be weighed 
and measured in the good time coming; and then, if 
we must have our diverse modes of faith and worship, 
the question for all the churches to answer will be. 
What sort of men do you raise in there, and women, 
— noble or mean, sweet or bitter, full of charity or 
stricken with bigotry, Christ-like and God-like, and 
loving the light or of those who hug the darkness, 
and have no part or lot in the city which standeth 
four-square; and so, in a word, if you ask me, 

" What is religion ? I will tell you what 
I think it is, — not blindly to disdain 
Thy reason, or to lay thee flat 



The City lieth Four-square 

Before a something terrible, unknown, 
Not bound with bristling fence of man-made creeds 
To thunder banns from thy presumptuous throne, 
Or bring God down and make his will thine own, 
But in his face with reverent love to look, 
Here where it shines in sky and land and sea, 
And, where a prophet speaks in holy book. 
To hear his word, and take that truth to thee, 
And hold it fast, and tread earth's lowly sod 
With open heart, as one who walks with God." 



ANTIPAS, MY FAITHFUL MARTYR. 



" Antipas, my faithful martyr." — Rev. ii. 13. 

This is only one brief line about this man, but it 
stands for a life and a death. We do not know who 
the man was, only wJiat he was, a martyr for God and 
his truth. And there is no word to tell us whether he 
was a young man or an old man, or had a wife and 
children or lived his own lone life, or loved this fair 
world with the love of the morning tide or had got a 
little tired of it all and was ready to go, or whether 
he went brave and defiant to his death or shrank back 
when the great moment came, while the flesh cried 
Recant " and the spirit spurred him on. 

Antipas, my faithful martyr," is all they tell us 
about him; and even this seems to float over to us 
from the heart of the great Divine Mystery. "I was 
in the spirit on the Lord's Day," the seer says, "and 
fell on a vision and heard a voice, and saw, as it 
were, the Son of Man, and was bidden to write this 
word, Antipas, my faithful mart}'r.*' So this is the 
way the light flashes for us across the darkness. A 
person of no account, so far as anybody knows, puts 
his life in pawn for this faith which had made him a 



AftiipaSy my Faitlifitl Martyr 



III 



new man; but they will not hurt him, I presume, if 
he will hold his tongue about it even now, and go 
with the crowd to the temple, toss a few grains of in- 
cense on the fire, and crook his knee. But, if he 
persists in this fooling, they will have his life; for 
they have made up their minds to stamp this thing 
out, and then there is no way open to Antipas but 
to die. 

He had, no doubt, dreamed also, as they all did 
then, that he might see the heavens open and the 
hosts of angels sweep down through the azure vault 
with a great shout, and the dead rise from their 
graves, and the grand new day of God begin. But 
there is no hope now that he will ever live to see the 
day; and so he dies and they have seen the end of 
Antipas. If they beheaded him, some pious souls 
might see to the funeral, weeping the while, collect 
the handful of ashes, and hide them somewhere in a 
little urn, and then, it may be, scratch a dove or a 
cross on the cover; and, if they threw him to the wild 
beasts, there would be a speedier end. ''There is an 
end, anyhow," they said who saw him vanish on that 
dim forgotten day. ''No more trouble about Antipas: 
he is blotted out." "Yes, out of your books," the 
Spirit says, "but not out of mine. I have not done 
with Antipas, my faithful martyr. I will touch his 
name with one gleam of immortal glory, and make it 
shine like a star when your names are forgotten. I 
want this man for a type: he shall stand for the in- 
stance of those who die for me and mine, and seem to 
be forgotten. It is not an end they have made, but a 



112 Antipas^ my Faithful Martyr 

beginning, and not the night which has touched 
them, but the great morning of God." 

Such is the meaning, as it seems to me, of this line 
which stands for a life and a death; and the truth it 
tells us is this: that those who stand steady and true 
to what they believe to be God's clear truth in this 
world and their own clear duty, and die for it as they 
have lived, and prompt us to say as we watch them 
vanish, "How soon we are forgotten! " are never for- 
gotten. There may not be this one line even to tell 
us how they fought and fell, but this makes no mat- 
ter. They have passed through a divine alchemy 
which has transformed the carbon into a gem. 

Still, no greater mistake can be made than that we 
make so often of thinking that your martyrs are only 
those who live and die for their doctrines and dogmas, 
though these be never so noble and true. Nor is it 
unfair to say that a good many of those who, in any 
age, stand ready to die in such quarrels, would still be 
no true martyrs if you should put them to death. 
Some are simply bigots, who, in the days that are 
gone, would just as easily put those to death who did 
not agree with them as they would die themselves, 
and always did this when they had the power. So 
these could not be martyrs in the high, sweet spirit of 
Antipas; while others again have stood ready to die, 
or have died, through a superb egotism or a devouring 
vanity rather than a quiet and sacred conviction of 
truth and duty, and gone posturing out of life, feeling 
that this was the way to immortal glory, and cheap at 
the price. 



Antipas, my Faithful Martyr 113 

Nor can we doubt that, while there is still a true 
doctrine men may well die for, such doctrines did not 
mean to men like Antipas what they may easily mean 
to you and me. They were not an end, then, but a 
means, and did not settle these questions of the Eter- 
nal Life, but started them, rather, and were not so 
much a specific for the cure of souls as a light on the 
way towards such a cure, faith that it could be done, 
courage to denounce the shams and quackeries all 
about them, and heroism to fight them to the death. 
So, in the work Antipas was called to do, the death he 
must die was but the close of the great heroic chapter; 
and a man like Paul would have been a martyr all the 
same if he had died in his bed. 

We have to notice, also, that the spirit of the age 
will not allow a man to be put to death for his opinions 
any more unless he tries to drive them home with lead 
and steel, so that even old John Brown was not a mar- 
tyr so much as the last of the Ironsides, who fought 
on the stricken field, and then, when the battle went 
against him, slipped out of the body to God. And so 
it is not only true that a man may die for what he calls 
his faith, yet be no martyr after all, but this is true, 
also, that the old paths to the martyr's death by cross 
and stake are closed ; and so it would be no use look- 
ing for men to match Antipas if this was the one way 
to martyrdom. But we know this is not the one way, 
nor are all the martyrs dead, while the terms on 
which they live and die are stern as ever, only they 
take other forms and work to other issues, while that 
which makes them and the stuff out of which they are 



114 AntipaSy my Faithful Mai'tyr 



made is here; and martyrs die every day, unnoted, 
easily forgotten, steady as Milton's angels, true as 
the old saints, — martyrs to truth and duty still and to 
God and his Christ. 

Shall I note some of these? Here is a man who is 
haunted all his life by some great invention or some 
supreme discovery in science or the arts a hundred 
years before the world is ready for it or it can be born 
from the womb of time; and so he works for this, 
starves for it, and is a fool over it in the world's com- 
mon judgment, while still the thing fills him with its 
bitter-sweet torment. And so he has to die, not hav- 
ing received the promise, but seeing it afar off; and 
then, w^hen he is dead, if he has any friends left, they 
draw^ a long breath, and brighten up a little as they 
return from his funeral, and say: "Poor fellow, he 
might have done something very good in the world but 
for that maggot in his brain. He had splendid 
powers. What a pity he should throw them all away 
over such a delusion as that which haunted him so 
long!" 

One such man I knew. He was haunted all his life 
by the idea of a grander and fairer social order, a new 
harmony among men, in which the sore conflict be- 
tween class and class would come to an end, and w^e 
would all be brothers. He used to come to see me 
now and then, and talk it over, — a man with a grand, 
craggy head and far-looking, deep gray eyes, the eyes 
of a prophet of the Lord, while it was wonderful, 
when he once struck his theme, to see the lights play 
about him as from the better world he was nursing in 



AntipaSy my Faithful Martyr 115 



his faithful old heart. But I used to say: ''Old man, 
it is not practical. The world we live in is not 
ready for it. We shall have to wait until we get 
nearer the millennium. The time is not yet." Well, 
he had a small fortune he had got together as a work- 
ing man and an inventor, for he was both; and, do 
what I would, I could not save him from investing the 
last dollar of it in his plan, just to make the demon- 
stration, if he could do no more. It broke down. 
There was no help for this. Then he died of a broken 
heart, and went up to take his place by Antipas, the 
faithful martyr, and cry, "How long, O 'Lord, how 
long?" 

Or it may be a man with a heavy burden and a 
weak back, a failing heart or brain and a sore battle, 
health for half a man and work for two men, tired 
when he wakes with a hard day before him, but quiet 
through it all, and with no thought of giving in, only 
of dying at his post; and he dies of the battle and the 
burden, faithful unto death. 

Or your martyr, again, may be a woman, delicate 
and pure as they are in heaven, aspiring always and 
always driven back, earnest as Charlotte Bronte, self- 
forgetful as Mary Ware, brave as Lucretia Mott, yet 
hopeless in her fortune as Pucelle, the pure, white 
maiden of France. 

Or she may be a wife and mother, borne down with 
heavy burdens, but bare of all sympathy or succor from 
the man who has brought them on her, and should 
clasp his arms about her now far more tenderly and 
surely than when he first won her love, her husband 



ii6 A7iiipas, my FaitJifiil Martyr 



and the father of her children. For what in the name 
of all that is most sacred in our life is the man good 
for who will load a woman down with the cares of a 
home and a family, and then let her fight the battle 
alone, while he is grumbling, as we used to say in 
Yorkshire, ''like a bear with a sore head," shutting 
his heart, but not man enough to shut his mouth, and 
watching her die daily before his eyes, a poor, sad, 
home-made martyr, and then marrying again before a 
twelvemonth, let us hope, to a vixen, w^ho will pay 
him back in his own coin, and serve him right? 

Antipas, my faithful martyr, is here in the world, 
then, to-day, doing his work and dying when his time 
comes, with the light in his eyes, — yes, or with a cloud 
in his eyes, as it may please God, — but faithful all 
the same unto death ; bearing the cross, but sure of the 
crown, or, what seems greater and grander still to me, 
bearing the cross, but not sure of the crown, and with 
never a thought that he is a martyr at all, yet entirely 
true to the last, and with no assurance of the waiting 
paradise in his poor, tired heart, only faithful mito 
death and to duty. 

For this is where we touch the deeper pathos 
of these unknown and unnoted martyrs that they 
are so very often of such small account in their own 
thought of themselves and of what they can do. 
The youth who would not bend before the great golden 
God, it may be, in this very town, but went into the 
fire, all the same, and did burn; the Noah whose 
name has not floated across the wreck of a nameless 
deluge, but who had a boat, and, when the waters 



AntipaSy viy Faithful Martyr 



117 



were out, filled her so full that she sank with all 
aboard, while he himself went down into the seething 
floods with them, and with as calm a heart as he ever 
had who floated safely to the crest of Ararat ; the man 
who lay all his life by the pool of healing, but was 
never helped in and never made whole, yet who was 
just as patient and hopeful on the last day as the first; 
the Paul who was not sure he had fought a good fight, 
but died fighting; and the John who was also on Pat- 
mos, some sort of lone Patmos somewhere in this 
world, for the faith that was in him, yet never saw the 
open heavens and the city of God. 

Antipas, — I knew him half a century ago; and he 
had it in him, 7nj/ Antipas, to sing Psalms as sweet as 
"The Lord is my Shepherd," and to slay giants as big 
as Goliath of Gath. But he died almost before he 
could begin, yet never for a moment lamenting his 
early doom; and I closed his eyes, and wept by his 
grave. Antipas, — he was a minister who went West 
into Illinois about 1831 as a missionary, and was true 
as Daniel; but he had no visions to keep him in heart 
that he could tell you of, so he grew old in his wan- 
dering, and the people did not care to hear him then, 
but still the burden lay on him to preach the Word 
in season and out of season. And then one night, as 
he wandered over the vast, lone prairies in the winter, 
the wolves came howling after him; and he was no 
more seen of men. 

Antipas, — long ago he used to come into the West- 
ern settlements of Pennsylvania in cider time, and 
load himself with apple pips, and then start westward 



ii8 



Antipas^ my Faithful Martyr 



again, no man knew where or on what errand. But, 
when the tides of emigration swept over the Ohio 
westward towards the great green lands, they found 
sunny spots by brooks and springs where there were 
little orchards of seedling apples fighting the wilder- 
ness; and a quarter of a century ago you could still 
find mossy patriarchs of that old man's planting, — 
who was a crank to the white man and a medicine man 
to the Indians, God's angel of the covenant, clad in 
skins. He saw the trend and the drift of the coming 
age and mianhood and the new homes, and gave his 
life for these; but no man knows where or when he 
died, or how he went to see what they had to say 
about it who keep the accounts when his work on the 
earth was done, the beautiful, holy work. 

Antipas, — Antipas was a woman who had an in- 
firmity fifty years, and spent all she had also, on the 
doctors, and then died of her disease, after raising 
two small children who were no more to her, save for 
her loving and yearning old heart, than they were to 
you or me. They were born in sin, and then the 
mother died; and then my Antipas, the dear saint, 
mothered them, that was all, and maintained them by 
workino* at a man2:le. I mind how I rushed into her 
cellar one day when I went over to see my mother, for 
we had worked together in the factory some years be- 
fore, so I always went to see her in her cellar; aiid 
there she was kneeling with those little children, 
saying her grace before meat, while her "meat'' was 
some dry bread and something you w^ould call tea if 
you should make believe very much indeed, and that 



AntipaSy my Faithful Martyr 119 

was all. But, when she was through, she rose, and 
whispered: "I was only saying my grace with the 
bairns, my lad. They will have a hard time when I 
leave them; and I shall have to go soon, and I want 
to teach them to be thankful, poor things, and my- 
self, too, for I have a deal to thank God for, thou 
knows." 

Antipas, — he was a rough in an English regiment 
when they took him prisoner, the heathen, and told 
him he might live if he would kotow before their 
chief. But he said, "Naay," — the long-drawn Saxon 
naay, — "I'se an Englishman. I weeant do nowt 
like that, and shame my sooart. I can die, but I 
cannot do that." And so he died. 

" Fair Kentish hop-fields round him seemed, 

Like dreams, to come and go. 
Bright leagues of cherry blossom seemed 

One living sheet of snow. 
The smoke above his father's door 

In low, soft eddyings hung. 
And must he watch it rise no more, 

Doomed by himself, so young?" 

There was but ' one way out of the trouble. He 
must not shame them there in the small cottage thou- 
sands of miles away: he must be a man, this poor fel- 
low, who never knew he was Antipas. 

Now, some lives pay their way close and clean to 
the end. Mine does, I know. So that if the High 
Powers should say, ''We have nothing else for you 
here or hereafter," I think I should answer: ''I make 
no claim. I would love to see those I have lost once 



I20 



Ajitipas, my Faitliful Martyr 



more who are in the blessed heavens ; but, if it is not 
to be so, I am still debtor for the untold blessing of 
my many years." So must many of us feel who have 
had such an even and happy lot as mine has been. 
We are no martyrs, or, indeed, we may not be of the 
stuff of which martyrs are made; and so it may be the 
dear God, Father of us all, chooses his men as a wise 
smith chooses his steel, mindful of the instrument he 
wants to make and use. I do not try to guess the 
divine reason for giving me the sunny side of the way. 
I only know it is so, and that he who rules in heaven 
has so far made no martyr of me, or put it in my way 
to be one, or, it may be, in yours; but what hosts 
there are who have never had our health or strength, 
or any gift at all except this of Antipas in the old 
days, — a steady courage to be faithful unto slaying, 
martyrs for God I And these, again, I think of most 
tenderly look for no reward in the blessed world to 
come. As I said, they are only eager to be true to 
their trust dow^n here. They may see others of whom 
they are ready to say, as we say of them, There must 
be an eternal love which will find these out finally, 
and give them their reward." It is never of them- 
selves they think; and yet that loving instinct which 
would insist on a blessed outlook for these others, 
which would make the odds even, is not this the in- 
stinct pointing towards a divine life, in which they 
will all be partakers of this great glory, which flashes 
for a single moment and in a single line out of 
heaven, as it were, and shows us Antipas among the 
shining ones, disappearing here, but appearing there, 



Antipas, my Faithful Martyr 12 1 

forgotten on this side, but immortal on that, here a 
handful of dust, there the very instance of that which 
can never die, departing with a moan, but springing 
into life again with a Psalm? 

And what I love better still to believe is this: that 
the dear God, our Father, will not let such men and 
women wait for the life to come after all before they 
know, in some dim, sweet fashion, what a glory rests 
on their unknown and unnoted life. Many a happy 
moment Antipas must have had before he went to the 
arena or the block, because this is what they all tell 
us whose experience is one with these obscure martyrs 
of every age. The great hope of the seeker, who 
never finds his great treasure in science or the arts, 
the great hope through which he trembles in ex- 
pectation like a bird burdened with a carol ; the eu- 
thanasia which steals over the poor martyr to duty at 
shy moments, and lights the pale face with a shining 
which is not of the sun. The near touch of heaven I 
felt in the presence of that poor old woman kneeling 
beside her mangle and asking a blessing on the 
crust and the thin ghost of the tea, — this is what 
my Antipas has for his bounty as he goes marching 
or stumbling to his unrecorded death, the great 
deep sea bearing up the poor little craft which is 
driving through the storm to the eternal rest and 
peace. 

The story can never be told of these gleams, but 
this is what they mean. They tell the discoverer, 
who still cannot quite discover, how surely the thing 
is there all the time, waiting to be revealed; and he 



122 AntipaSy my Faithful Martyr 



knows it is all right, though he may never get at the 
rights of it the longest day he lives. They touch 
fainting men and women in their weakness and pain, 
as the angel touched the prophet, and give them the 
heaven-baken bread, on the strength of which they go, 
also, their forty days in the wilderness. They are 
the proof before letters of the coming of the Lord, 
while the waiting heavens seem but a waste and "a 
space thick sown with alienated stars." 

I treasure a little wood-cut by Millais of a woman 
standing within the clutch of the incoming tide. 
She is bound there, and the waters are rising about 
her. There is no hope for her: she is doomed, and 
must die. But her face is turned upward by just a 
thought, as we should say, and her eyes shine with a 
great sweet light. It does not occur to you as you 
look at her that she feels the waters creeping up about 
her, because her heart is in heaven; and under the 
picture you read these lines : — 

Murdered for owning Christ supreme 
Head of His Church, and no more crime ; 
But, for not owning prelacy 
And not abjuring Presbytery, 
Within the sea, tied to a stake, 
She suffered for Christ Jesus' sake." 

That picture tells me the story I want to learn and 
need to learn about Antipas, my faithful martyr. 
The flames do not gather upon them or the waters de- 
vour them, after all, because God sees to it by a divine 
masterhood; and death is lost in victory. 

So my thought points towards a few simple lessons, 



Aiitipas^ my Faithful Martyr 123 

and this is the first: We are not to think these 
martyrdoms came to an end when the world we live 
in came to the conclusion that 

If a man's belief be bad, 

It will not be improved by burning." 

Men and women die martyrs now as they died in the 
old bad days. It is not in the old brutal way, but it 
is just as painful; and martyrdom goes on in obscure 
corners -still, — where a great truth or a great reform 
which will win the world to a better life in the long 
day of God finds my Antipas; where great discoveries, 
that hold in their hearts a vast benediction to man, 
haunt those who cannot but work at them until they 
drop in their tracks; in homes the law cannot touch, 
also, and in cellars and garrets where forlorn men and 
women would any day welcome death as a grand and 
blessed boon, but keep up their hearts and face their 
duty cheerfully. Some of them are as sure of heaven as 
if they were there; and some are rough, homespun men, 
of no vision and of the earth, earthy, until the great 
moment comes, and then they jam the wheel and run 
the boat ashore to save the passengers, dropping, 
when that is done, a burnt ember; keep their hand 
on the lever and mind the train, but are crushed in 
the deed out of all semblance of a man; leap into the 
furnace of a burning home after a woman or a little 
child, and come out no more. All martyrs, and all 
martyrs for God in duty and in a simple manhood, 
gathering their whole power into one spring for this 
and landing in the everlasting life, while they leave 



124 



Antipas^ viy FaitJifiil Martyr 



us to our disputes about who shall be saved, and 
becoming themselves the supreme instance in such 
supreme self-sacrifice, heedless of what we mav sav 
about their doom, leaving all this to take care of 
itself, but then doing more to enlarge and sweeten 
our ideas of God's saving grace in such noble saving, 
perhaps, than all our preaching. 

And this is the second: that those of us who have 
some chance at helping or may have, by reason of our 
better fortune and lot. shall do what we can for these 
obscure and unnamed martyrs. It mav not be much 
we can do; but we can do something, if it is only to 
say to them: "This is my fight, too: and I am with 
you in vour forlorn hope, in your sad lot. in \'our 
pioneering. You have my sympathy. I am your 
friend." There can never be more than a handful in 
such a case, never more than the twelve : but. then, 
what a grand thing it is to count for one in the twelve, 
even if it be but the doubting Thomas, the least of 
them all I We can help those, it may be. who would 
fain hide some noble thought in the world's life, but 
cannot find the way to do it. or those who bear heavy 
burdens on weak backs, or those who. within the husk 
of a rough and. it may be, an evil life, still hold this 
kernel of nobility, while we may sing our Psalms and 
sav our pravers. be proud of our churches and think 
our ministers are the very flower of the flock: but. if 
we do not keep our hearts open and warm towards 
these obscure mart}'rs. we are not of His heart by 
whose name we are called. 

Do I speak to those, finally, who, as life opens and 



A7ttipaSy my Faithful Martyr 



125 



duty begins to grow clear, will find it is hard and try- 
ing work to stand and fight for the outcast truth, for 
the unpopular reform, for anything that comes within 
the scope of my thought? Take heart, and go right 
on when that time comes. You may be troubled, 
do not be distressed; perplexed, you must not de- 
spair; persecuted, do not even imagine you are for- 
saken; cast down, you cannot be destroyed. 

In the old monastic gardens which have lain to the 
wilderness these three hundred years, when they dig 
down deep and turn up the soil, flowers spring and 
bloom again which have been buried ever since the 
harrying of the monks; and so shall your sowing be. 
You will think no man cares, — well, then, God cares. 
That you can do no one thing worth a moment's mem- 
ory; so, it may be, thought Antipas, my faithful 
martyr; so thought my poor old friend, kneeling in 
her cellar; but I told that story many years after to a 
great congregation in a church in her own town, and 
a little host of them flocked about me after the ser- 
vice, and said, "Yes, we mind old Nelly, too, and her 
wonderful gentle heart." And I found, as we talked 
of her, that she was preaching better sermons after 
she was dead all those years than most of us preach 
who are living. 

And you may think this may end it all. You were 
never more mistaken. The great, full tides will bear 
up your bark, never fear; or the tempter may tell you 
how you will have twice as good a time if you will 
only give up half your manhood. Tlie tempter lies, 

"It's dogged as does it," the poor day-laborer says to 



126 



Antipas, my Faitlifiil Martyr 



the parson in the story, when he finds him quite broken 
down; and, it may be, this will be all you can do, and 
all Antipas could do that day. Well, then, I will 
pray: God, make me as noble in my doing as some 
dogs I know of are in theirs; and I will win the day 
by sheer doggedness, but I will win the day." 



THE GREAT DIVINE SERMON. 



"He opened his mouth, and taught them. And, when he had ended 
these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine." — Matt. v. 2. 
vii. 28. 

When we find our way to the heart of the Sermon 
on the Mount, we love to believe that a divine in- 
spiration has given to it the place it holds as the key- 
note of the Gospels. 

It is so full of good cheer that, when we take it 
to our own hearts, we find our life is shorn of very 
many of the troubles we go half-way to meet, and 
so full of the divine truth and grace that it comes 
home to the sincere soul in some such way as a sum 
well done comes home to a man with a good head 
for figures; while, if we believed and accepted the 
truth it tells us, there would be no more trouble or 
dismay, either about the way of life or its consumma- 
tion, and no painful surmise about the doctrines and 
dogmas which lie outside its sunny boundaries, be- 
cause the inward life and light we may find there 
would make the whole earth luminous to the hearer as 
it was to the preacher, and as much of heaven as we 
need to see through the veil. 

Fending and proving would seem to be poor work 
when we held conference with ourselves about its holy 



128 



The Great Divine Sermon 



verities, as when the master put Euclid before New- 
ton, and he said, "Yes, this is true, of course," and 
then went on to explore the deeper mysteries of which 
that was to him the alphabet^ until he had weighed 
the mountains in scales also, and the hills in a bal- 
ance, and taken up the isles as a very little thing. 

It would be as natural for us to take the truth it holds 
into our hearts as it is for a healthy man to breathe 
the fresh air or eat good bread or drink pure water; 
while we should seek this or that holy word we may 
find here for the soul's sickness, as the creatures 
that live close to nature seek herbs for their hurts. 

So I do not make light of the Scriptures when I say 
that, if the whole divine wealth of them besides could 
be lost, we should still have a Bible in this sermon, 
and should only be the poorer as those are poor who 
have no silver, let us say, but have still enough of 
gold to answer all their needs, or as those are poor 
who have no food to answer all their desires, but have 
still full and plenty of the bread and milk and of meat 
and fruit on which men grow strong for the work they 
have to do. 

Thomas Hughes says preachers should calculate 
their sermons, as the astronomer makes his almanacs, 
to the meridian of the people and the place they are 
intended for; but the Sermon on the Mount, to my 
own mind, is true to all the meridians, because its 
noon and night find their parallel always on the lines 
where the Lord God is the sun. And so it is as true 
to my soul's windows as to any, and as true to any as 
to mine, running through all the latitudes and longi- 



The Great Divine Sermon 



129 



tudes Paul thinks of when he says God, who made the 
world and all things therein, is not far from every 
one of us, seeing that in him we live and move and 
have our being. 

And reasons are the pillars of your sermon, Thomas 
Fuller says, while similitudes are the windows that 
let in the light; and we all know this who have had 
much to do with preaching or hearing. Well, the 
reasons in this sermon stand deep and true to me as 
the pillars of heaven, while the similitudes that adorn 
it are as the windows of sapphire and crystal that 
glass the way to the suns and stars. 

You must not tire your hearers with long ser- 
mons, Luther said; while, when George Fox heard 
one early in his life which lasted four hours, it was 
borne in on him by the spirit that preaching should 
be abolished. And yet it is hard for us to draw the 
line here, when one sermon of a hundred and twenty 
minutes shall seem shorter to your hearers than an- 
other of half an hour. 

I still remember how a man with a grand craggy 
head and wonderful gray eyes would come down from 
the hills and preach to us in my youth, who would 
seldom let us off under the hour or the hour and a 
half; but I also remember how his sermons would 
often end for me in a great hunger to hear more and 
more, while with some of the brethren, who were apt 
to be brief, it was just the other way, for the time 
comes when you cannot catch even young birds with 
chaff. 

But the Sermon on the Mount never torments 



130 The Great Divine Sermon 

me, and never tires, because it is like the city 
the seer saw in his vision, of which he says the 
length and the breadth and the height of it are 
equal; while a great and venerable man told me once 
that, when you heard Dr. Channing read from it, you 
seem.ed to hear the sum of all true preaching. Its 
closing words, as he read them, touched you as if you 
were in the tornado. You saw the house built on the 
sand shudder down to its doom. It was the echo in 
our century of the wonder which astonished those who 
heard the matchless discourse which had come to the 
preacher instantly from God. 

We are all aware also that a great many sermons, 
and some of ours no doubt among them, are like a 
glass of Missouri water. You must let them settle in 
some quiet place before you can see through them, 
and then there is a gritty and earthy substance you 
are bound to reject. But the Sermon on the Mount 
runs as clear as the springs that percolate and pour 
through the granite among the hills of New Hamp- 
shire. 

Or you seldom hear a sermon in which you are 
not aware of a crevice in the preacher's mail 
through which you could lance him easily if you were 
at all so ruthless in your fence as he is in the charge, 
and especially when you are at odds about the doc- 
trine. Or you can see by one swift glance that the 
whole structure of the sermon is poor and mean, and 
stands against the background of the truth he is there 
to tell, as the hut of the Arab stands against the 
grand outlines of Baalbec or Palmyra; but here is no 



The Great Divi7ie Sermon 



131 



earthy and gritty substance you are bound to reject, 
no crevice in the shining armor of proof, and no mean 
conclusion in the sermon which his voice 

" Hath here delivered words of heartfelt truth, 
Tending to patience when affliction strikes, 
To hope and love and confident repose 
In God, and reverence for the life of man." 

But is it not true again that we all shrink in some 
moods from reading the searching sentences, because 
they are God's very truth, and because they smite us 
in a fashion against which we have no defence? 
We would fain tamper with them, or, if it were possi- 
ble, blow them down the wind, or say they are true 
up to a certain point, and then file a bill of excep- 
tions; or else we would creep into the shell of human 
inability, and wait for easier terms, as if we should ask 
the Most High to ordain new standards to meet our 
short weights and measures, or let the sun stand still 
for our backward planting and the rain hold up for our 
easy-going harvesting. 

We balk at the Beatitudes, when this heart is in us. 
They challenge us too greatly, and mean too much 
until we mean more. "Blessed are the poor in spirit." 
Such poverty does not please us. We want all the 
treasures of the kingdom, if we could have them down 
on the nail. "Blessed are they that mourn." We do 
not think so. Mourning is not to our mind. We 
would wear our rue with a difference .of exemption. 
" Blessed are the meek." We believe in striking back. 
No man shall push us to the wall. Your meek man 



132 



TJie Great Divine Sermon 



is apt to be a milk-sop. And so it is with the whole 
blessed word. We have our own ideas about these 
things, and may say the sermon is divinely true, and 
then break down at the exordium. 

We come to the divine Preacher in our need, and 
ask him to help us solve the painful problems of this 
human life, and help us on our way. Why have we 
to drink so deep betimes of these wells of ilarah? 
How is it that we are subjected to this strain, in 
which one force drags us down, while the other draws 
us upward? and why are we so full of unrest about 
those things that are half within and half without, or 
are only seen as through a glass darkly? and ask 
whether the mark of rank in nature is the capacity for 
pain? What is the holy truth of God? Where is the 
perfect trust, and how shall we find the rest that re- 
mains? We come to him with these problems, and 
here in his sermon he offers us the master key; but we 
do not want to enter in through the door, after all. 
The demand on us is too severe; and we fall back on 
the thought that the true thing to do is not to fight, but 
to find a substitute, or wrench the holy word to our 
own purpose, and then bury the text in the com- 
mentary. 

We cannot meet the monition, Let thy garments 
be always white," and so we welcome the teaching 
that we can exchange our filthy rags, as we call them, 
in an instant for the white robes of the saints; or 
this, "Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is 
perfect," and so we seek this perfection not in our- 
selves, but in another. 



The Great Divine Sermon 



133 



Nor must we wonder at this once more when the 
truth that comes home to us in the divine sermon 
takes the meaning of an instant demand to be met at 
once by this perfection on our part, or we shall stand 
as convicts in the courts of the Most High. This is 
where the temptation comes in on the one side to find 
an imputed righteousness and on the other to be con- 
tent with some lower standard of life and character, 
because we may think this is too high even to strive 
after. 

And so it is as if your painter, standing face 
to face with one of the noblest pictures in the world, 
should say: "This will never do for me. I must 
choose one in which the lines are not quite so true or 
the form and color so perfect " ; or as if a man, setting 
out to make a chronometer which shall be a glory to him 
and a praise, should reject one of those for his ideal 
you can carry round the world through frost and fire, 
to find it has not lost a moment, and take one for his 
pattern you have to guess at. 

Now, to my own heart and mind, the Sermon on the 
Mount is the holy and perfect truth touching my life I 
am to strive after always and with all my heart. It is 
to be the inspiration and the standard for my striving, 
but never the despair when its words seem to challenge 
me to meet their august demand at once and forever, 
or I shall go to the wall. I know that this is of no 
more use than if I was learning to become an archi- 
tect, and Angelo should rise from the dead, and say to 
me, "Now go to work at once, and build a cathedral 
equal to mine yonder in Rome, or quit this business." 



134 



The G^'eat Divme Sermon 



Tell me I must attain to this perfection in life and 
life's worth the first time I try, and then I cannot 
even try, poor creature as I am, any more than I 
would try to lift the great Krupp gun; but tell me 
this is the standard to which I may attain, that I find 
in my sermon the challenge, the inspiration, and the 
incentive, the mark and prize of my high calling I 
shall hold in my heart, and never dare to say this is 
good enough so long as I fall short of its light and 
leading, and that this is not to be done by my own 
lone self, but that all heaven is on my side, and is 
bound to see me win soon or late. Then I shall 
begin to find the true meaning and purpose of the 
Sermon on the Mount. 

The divine worth of it for me will lie then in my 
steadfast purpose to be so perfect, and in the way I set 
my face and step out; for let this be settled once for 
all, and then there may be better men than I am in 
this attainment, yet they shall not be so good, because 
I may be pushing forward while they are falling back. 

This is the trouble I find in the later pictures of one 
great master, because even with my poor insight I can 
see how he has lost track in them of the old striving 
after the perfection which makes his earlier work so 
wonderful to me, and so welcome, I see how there was 
a time when it was his meat and drink to do the will of 
God, and is painting his matchless pictures moved by 
the holy spirit of sincerity and truth ; but, then, you can 
see how the time came when he would gain the whole 
world, and lose his own soul. But another whose 
work is a perpetual delight to me was striving onward, 



The Great Divine Sermon 



135 



while he was falling backward; and so, while for 
some space there was no comparison between the old 
master and the new, there was this deep distinction, — 
that the one was pressing onward toward the mark and 
the prize of his high calling, while the other was 
backsliding, and did not care. 

Now, this is the divine secret to me of the sermon 
as the standard and incentive for your life and mine. 
We may know very well that we have not attained or 
are already perfect to the line of its demand; but the 
question is. Do we want to be and mean to be, and are 
we trying now to touch even the hem of this pure 
white robe? 

When one said to the old master, "I cannot see in 
nature the glory you have hidden in that picture," he 
answered, ''Do you not wish you could, then?" Now 
this may be my trouble as I hear the Master say, 
"See those lilies, watch those birds, and see how your 
Father which is in heaven cares for them " ? When I 
look up, and cannot see what he saw, is there any hun- 
ger in my heart to be one with him in the vision ? or 
is there a chasm between us I do not care and do not 
try to pass, as he sits there still and speaks to me, 
and would have me be one with him, as he was one 
with the Father? The Sermon on the Mount is not 
the despair, I repeat, but the inspiration, for your 
life and mine. Had it not been possible for us to 
reach upward toward its holy bidding and meet its 
holy claims, it would never have been preached. The 
preacher never wastes his words as we do. Very 
often they may mean more than he could pack into that 



136 



Tlie Great Diviiie Sermo7i 



poor folk speech he had to use, but they never mean 
less. He is sincere with us as the day. 

And so there is something very sweet and true to 
me in the loyalty of good and sincere men, who are 
troubled in watching the drift of the times, to the 
great divine sermon. They want what we all want, 
stand where we will and believe as we will, — a sure 
word from Heaven, a ''Thus saith the Lord, " now that 
the Scriptures have been called into court and ques- 
tioned as to their absolute or their essential truth. 

There is no sure refuge any more in the claim of 
their verbal infallibility. The proof is in and accepted 
that they are not wholly divine, but that many things 
in them are only human, and some fall short of that; 
while we must find what is divine in the whole sum 
of them, as we find the gold in the earth and dross. 

Human souls are floating out on the waste waters of 
negation, and the age is asking, ''What is truth? " with 
a new accent ; and the answer comes from men with 
this heart in them, and insight, "Here is triitli beyond 
all question, with the dew of heaven on it and the 
untouched bloom," and they say, "We will hold on 
right here until we have taken our bearings to the di- 
vine sermon and the truth it reveals," and so it be- 
comes in some sort their catechism and creed. 

This was the stand made by the fathers of our own 
faith, and the standard about which they gathered. 
They must find the truth from God which would com- 
mand their deepest reverence and purest loyalty. 
They found it in this sermon and in other Scriptures 
as true to its lofty harmony as the notes in your perfect 



The G7'eat Divine Ser7non 



137 



octave; and then they said, "Exhaust such truths as 
these or get beyond them in your quest for the truth of 
God." You can exhaust the ocean sooner or get be- 
yond the stars. Despise them, look down on them! 
You can despise geometry sooner, when you want to 
catch the secret of the constellations or neglect them. 
You can neglect sooner the sowing of fine wheat and 
the baking of good bread. 

So we may think we have gone far beyond the 
fathers of oar faith now that light has come into the 
world touching a great many questions they did not 
dream of fifty years ago. And this may be true; but 
is not this true also, — that we have none of us risen so 
high that we can look down on these blessed teachings 
for our faith and life? Some things are always and 
eternally true, — just as true before they are revealed 
as they ever can be afterwards ; and the truth I find 
here holds this worth to me in its heart, and when 
I fall back on it, if I will answer to its inspira- 
tion and life that may be, as when in the contest a 
young athlete falls back that he may strive forward to 
a finer purpose. 

But the years have taught me for one that we can 
make no graver mistake than this we may make when 
we cleave to the letter rather than the spirit, so that 
the sermon shall become not a living word to us and 
whole, but a collection of dogmas and instances, in 
which we miss the whole beating life which lies 
within its heart. It must be to us all as it is with 
my true artist, if I may bring him up again, who will 
not dwell with the grandest picture in all the world 



138 



Tlie Great Divine Se7'mon 



to his mind that he may learn to copy merely, because 
there is a noble ambition in his soul to create. He 
wants to find the spirit and life there in its whole- 
ness; and, while he may never hope to surpass the 
master, if there is a true heart in him and ambi- 
tion, the time is sure to come when he will be a mere 
copyist no longer, but one who will do his own work 
in his own way, calling no man master. 

And so it must be with our reverence and loyalty 
even to the great divine sermon. It must be fluent and 
plastic to each man and woman, and have no power or 
purpose of crowding us down or of cutting and clip- 
ping away at us, as if we were so many plants in an 
old Dutch garden, because there is no true growth in 
grace for us then. It is a grand, free outline, inviting 
and inspiring my own growth toward the perfection of 
the Father on the lines of my own nature; and, to be 
worthy its demand, I must stand true to this free spirit 
and imperial word, and I must bring to it or find in it 
an imperial soul. 

It is no machine like those that turn out the 
watches. It is as the seed and tilth, the sunshine 
and shadow, the insight and oversight, and the sea- 
sons which bring forth the harvest home. So let 
me be sure of this; and then, when I want to find 
some sure word of God to help and inspire me, when 
my life is full of trouble and dismay, and heart and 
flesh fail, I will sun my soul in the Beatitudes, or if I 
would touch the very nerve of cleanness or of gentle- 
ness or of the love which never faileth. If I want to 
give so that it shall be like God's own giving, or would 



The Great Divine Sermon 



139 



pray so that the answer shall abide within the asking, 
or to trust in the eternal love which clasps my life all 
about and the eternal providence which holds me fast, 
let me take the sermon to my heart; and it shall be 
with me as when Luther saw the small birds swinging 
on the spray in the gloaming, and flying forth in the 
morning, singing their song, and quite sure of their 
provision for the day, because they were sure of them- 
selves. 

Or, when I would find what worth abides in this 
system of faith or that, in this Church or another, 
High Church or Low, narrow or broad, this claim 
founded on the divine authority or that on the divine 
reason, the true inward light, here I shall be sure to 
find the true answer to my question in the sermon which 
has outlasted the pride and glory they were carving in 
marble and moulding in bronze when the words came 
floating on the breath of a summer's day from his 
heart who spake as never man spake. 

The Sermon on the Mount has come unscathed 
through the fires of time, clothing itself in purer 
meanings and winning nobler intepretations. Our 
little systems have grown and ripened, and left their 
seed to be sown again for finer harvests; but this 
abides as it was gathered from those who had treas- 
ured it in good and honest hearts, sincere and sweet, 
forevermore, as the bread which cometh down from 
heaven. 

Men also and churches have deformed it by false 
interpretations, twisted it into uncouth meanings, and 
degraded it, as when you cast pearls before swine; but 



140 The Great Divine Sermon 

the jewels have taken no taint, because the sermon 
holds within itself the light of heaven as the great 
rose diamond does, and with the light the freshness 
and sweetness as of the spring. And so I love this 
loyalty of the deeper heart in our time to the sermon, 
and would share it. I find in it a constitution within 
which I can be God's free man, and a creed, if I need 
one, so large and inclusive that I need feel no fear 
about being left out of the number of those who want 
to witness a good confession touching their faith in 
God and his Christ. It affords for me a rule of life 
which must be true and good in any world to come 
and of faith which will stand all weathers in 

" This age that blots out life with question-marks, 
This nineteenth century with its knife and glass, 
That makes truth physical, and thrusts far off 
The heavens so neighborly to man of old 
To space sparse sown with alienated stars." 



WHY SIMON PETER WENT A-FISHING. 



" Simon Peter said to them, I go a-fishing." — John xxi. 3. 

Simon Peter was a fisherman when the Master 
found him, and called him to be an apostle; while not 
long ago he was dreaming of a day near at hand when 
the Messiah would drop his disguise once for all, 
reveal his divine mission and authority, drive the 
powers then in possession of his holy land to the 
wall, and establish a kingdom in which he who had 
been a mere fisherman on the lakes would be a prince 
in Israel and hold the wealth of the world at his 
command. 

How his family fared in those times we do not 
know, but may still imagine it would be rather hard 
now and then to make ends meet, as it is so often 
still, if the bread-winner is a dreamer when he should 
be a worker, and by all means hold the home well 
together, though it be at the cost of the kingdom 
which is seething in his heart and brain like new 
wine in the vat. But the dream has come now to a 
rude and woful waking. The kingdom is not of this 
world. So much is clear at last. This is all he can 
be sure about. The rest is hidden in a mist. 



142 Why Simo7t Peter went a-fishing 



There was some money also before the fearful sor- 
row struck them which ended on the cross; but this 
vanished with Judas, who had the bag. So it is clear 
again that something must be done, and done quickly, 
for bare bread, or they will starve; and, as all the 
ways are closed except the one which leads down 
toward the beach and the boat, he was fain to say, 
"I go a-fishing." 

And I think he must have made up his mind to 
return to the old craft and calling also through the 
conviction, which would grow strong in him, that this 
was all he was good for now. 

There was a time not long ago when the Master 
had said, ''Thou art Cephas, and on this rock I will 
build my church, and the gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail against it." But he had made fearful work of his 
faith and life since that day in denying the best and 
dearest friend he had in all the world, when he should 
have stood to his colors like a brave and "true man, 
and defied the mob to do its worst. 

Indeed, it was only the other day that he had said 
he would die with him and for his sake, but had 
broken the promise shamefully. Yet, as there was 
still the making of a very grand man in him, as we 
know, he was smarting for it now, and calling himself 
by all sorts of evil names. But now in the very 
crisis of his shame and self-abasement there came to 
him one little gleam of light, if I have caught the 
true thread of his story. He must have said to him- 
self : "There is still one thing you can do to hold your 
ov/n like a man among men. You can go back to 



Why Simon Peter went a-jishing 143 

your old craft and calling on the water. The thrones 
and dominions may have all been a delusion and a 
snare, but there is no delusion in the old boat and the 
nets. 

You thought you were a man who could win in 
every battle. You were a mere poltroon in a fight 
like that you had to face the other day; and now, if 
God wants men to do his work in this world, you can 
be sure he will not want you. The Master said, 
'Thou art rock,' while you see you are a mere heap of 
shifting sand; but you do know all about storms and 
how to handle a boat in the worst that ever came 
sweeping down from the hills, while, if you are 
beaten in the last and worst, please God, you will 
know now how to die a man's death, though you have 
failed to live a man's life. So you can take to your 
old calling again, to win, it may be, some new grain of 
the self-respect in it you have lost, and prove yourself 
a man after all." And so he said, "I go a-fishing." 

Nor can I doubt that this was the very best and 
wisest thing he could do that day, — to fall back into 
the old grooves of the home again and the good day's 
work, because rest would be found in the work, help 
in the home, and the healing he could hope to find no- 
where else in the world just then. 

We may well believe his wife could have no great 
sympathy with his dreams of thrones and kingdoms, 
while, it may be, it was so hard for her to keep the 
home together and find milk and bread for the chil- 
dren; still, when he came home after that woful night 
in the judgment hall, with the pain and shame of it 



144 



Why Simon Peter went a-fishing 



in his heart and eyes, the good wife and mother then 
would rise to the great and royal demand. 

The whole w^orld might cry shame on him now, 
but not this one woman. She knows what she has 
to do in this sore crisis. She has to come close 
to his side, to stand by him like a true comrade, 
and help him the best she knows. Have we not 
all known such good women, standing in the forlorn 
hope shoulder to shoulder with such men, when to 
our thinking it w^as against all reason? and we say, 
"The man deserves his doom," while our hearts beat 
with a proud and tender sympathy for the woman, and 
we said, " Gabriel, the great angel, could fight no such 
battle." 

So I wish I could paint you a picture of that going 
home, and recall the sweet, low tones that would run 
through her words of w^elcome and the gentle light 
that shone in her eyes, the steadfast loyalty revealed 
in many w^ays with that eager welcome, yet not over- 
eager, lest his pride take fire, w4th never a hint of "I 
told you so," or "This is what your dream of the 
thrones and kingdoms has come to " from those loyal 
and loving lips. 

And so to take to the boat again and the fishing 
was to take to the home in this one true way, as 
men must do who know what is best for them, 
when hope burns low, when pride is broken, when joy 
is slain, and they imagine they have not one friend 
left on the earth or in heaven. 

They have one friend left. We have all one friend 
left then, who are so blessed as I shall not doubt 



Why Simon Peter went a-fisking 145 

this man was, — the woman who will help us when 
we seem to have no strength and courage left to 
help ourselves. Yet I am not sure that he thought 
of this indeed, only of taking right hold, first of all, 
where he had left off, and taking home his load of 
fish for a token of what lay in his heart; and, when 
this was done, the rest would be done by indeed the 
better half. 

It was a wise and good thing again for him to say, 
"I go a-fishing," as I think, when I try to find the 
man's heart through my own. Because this would not 
only solve the question of the daily bread, reveal what 
real manhood was still in him, and bring him home to 
his own fireside, where he would find gentle hands to 
heal his hurt and the presence of the wife and chil- 
dren to lure him out of the pain, but it would take 
him back to Nature, the good mother and helper of 
us all. 

So he would go out on the water with his trouble; 
and the mother would rock him on the waves, would 
soothe him with cool winds, and shine down gently 
on him in the night from her stars, whispering such 
peace as could come to him then from her heart help- 
ing him to forget his trouble for a while perhaps, and 
so tone to-morrow half a note higher than to-day. 

It was a wise and good thing for him to do also, 
when we think of the wonder which had stormed the 
very citadel of his life since Easter morning. Here 
was the risen spirit of the dear Friend and Master in 
this world again, stealing out from within the veil, 
burning through the shadows of death, touching them 



146 Why Simcn Peter went a-fishing 

in the living presence, and winning them to the con- 
viction they lived henceforth and died to maintain, 
that death had no dominion and the grave no victory 
over his living soul. That the man should be bewil- 
dered by the w^onder when it touched him, and feel as 
if the use and wont of life was no longer to be trusted 
on the land, would be quite natural; and so he would 
take to the water, because your true sailor always 
draws a deep line between his own familiar element 
and ours, and expects to get his bearings on the water 
he may have lost on the land. 

There could be no mistake about the fishing, and 
no mystery about the honest old craft. She would 
answ^er to the tiller and go before the wind; while the 
winds and waters and the night would be all about 
him and familiar to his shaken heart, and real. So 
he must have said: "Let me do this, and I shall 
know where I am and what I am about. Then, if 
the dear Friend and Master should come to me there, 
and find me hard at work, as I was when he called me 
in the old days to follow him, it will be the best 
proof I can give him now of what manhood remains 
in me after my shameful treason in the hall, when 
I went out weeping bitterly." And so he said, "I 
go a-fishing." 

These, then, are among the reasons that come home 
to me, as I try to find the man's heart through my 
own, why he should take to the boat and the day's — 
or shall we say the night's? — work; and now, if this 
was the last word we were ever to hear about him, 
should we not all be ready to say: " Poor troubled 



Why Simon Peter zvent a-fishing 147 



brother, you made bad work of it that night in the 
hall, but there can be no mistake about this you mean 
to do now. 

It is far better for you to be out in the boat, the 
bread-winner, as things stand with you now, than to 
be shut up in your chamber on your knees, because 
all the prayers you can say from this to sunrise will 
not bring a pound of meal or a bowl of milk for those 
you have to fend for there in the home. 

Better by far be grasping the tiller, minding the 
sail, and hauling at the nets than folding your hands 
or beating them on your breast in despair. This 
labor is prayer in the pass to which you have come, 
this lake your kingdom, and this boat your throne. 
Better be fishing than reading your Bible, even if 
you own one, because what a man brings to his Bible 
is of quite as deep a moment very often as what 
he finds in it. You might take to those rose-colored 
glasses again for the reading, as so many do in your 
case, and goto hunting up all the passages in your 
prophets about the thrones and kingdoms, which 
would lead you to imagine you were right, after 
all, about the dream, and all you had to do was to wait 
where you have now made up your mind to work. 

You can give no better proof that a new life is stir- 
ring in your heart which will make you a prince of a 
grander type than all your dreams, no better proof 
than this you give in taking hold again down at the 
base line of your life and fortune. You have got 
your lever all right now, and may yet do your noble 
stroke at lifting the world; for the one thing for a 



148 



Why Simon Peter went a-fishing 



man to do, first of all, is to be true to the duty of the 
day, and that means for you the care of his home and 
family." 

So runs my thought of some reasons why Simon 
Peter said, "I go a-fishing"; and now shall we try to 
see what he might have said and done, trying still to 
find the clew to his life through our own, and what we 
might be tempted to do in some such case? 

The man had been nursing a faith in God, as he 
thought, which but a few days ago seemed to be as 
firm as the earth he stood on and as true as the arches 
of the heavens. It seems that he had pawned his 
home on it and all he had in the world in the assur- 
ance that he should be amply and gloriously re- 
warded, only to find he was utterly mistaken, when his 
dream had burst like a shining bubble, and the 
thrones and kingdoms were a mirage which had gone 
down with the sun. 

His hopes had soared as on the wings of eagles, 
centrins: all in Simon Peter and his kith and kin. 
They were shot through the heart by these awful 
arrows of disaster, and lay dead about his feet. Yes; 
and his love was so deep just now that he had stood 
ready to die for the proof of it, so he said, but the 
one brief hour had proven it was self-love, very mean 
also and poor at that, and so the love had gone to 
wreck with the faith and hope. 

Now we may have all known those, or may be of 
them, who, when this befell, would not feel after a 
surer faith, a diviner hope, and the love which never 
faileth, which is only another name for the love of 



Why Simon Peter ivent a-fishing 149 

God, but would take a more dogged grip on what we 
call realities, and make these the great aim and end 
of life; and Simon could have done this when he 
said, "I go a-fishing.'^ 

He could have said, " I have come to grief and sore 
loss through my dream, and am as poor as poverty; 
but minted gold is good and lands and houses. So I 
will make money now, and have those, because they 
are real things; while I notice that nowadays men 
are usually esteemed and exalted not so much for 
their worthiness as for what they are said to be 
worth." 

So he could have lived his life and done his work, 
worshipping the golden calf the while, — an easy thing 
for one of his race to do, you say; but I answer, "Not 
one mite easier for one of his race than for one of 
ours." Still, he could have done this; and then a 
day could have come when they would have called in 
the priest, the doctor, and the lawyer, — for this was 
the end of all his labor under the sun, — and the 
mourners would go about the streets, and the people 
say: ''He made a blessed end. Lo, this money left 
to the synagogues and the temple, a clear tenth of 
all he was worth!" This he could have done for a 
nine days' wonder, but there would be no more trace 
of him to-day than there is of his dust. 

But let us see now what the drift and trend was 
from sundown that day when he said, ''I go a-fishing," 
to the day when he saw the sun set for the last time 
on this earth. 

He went back to such realities as were left for 



150 Why Simon Peter zvent a-fishing 



him when his life had suffered that sad wreck, and 
would try to make a living, because this was all 
he could do just then. He would anchor the boat 
to his doorstep, take her out, earn his bread, and 
try to find his bearings; but this was not all he 
w^ould do. He carried with him an eager and wistful 
heart, which was opening toward a new and nobler 
life even then; and it was right there among the reali- 
ties he could still trust that the deeper and diviner 
realities began to take his soul captive. 

He went back to his day's work, and thereby found 
his way to his throne and princedom; back to nature, 
and found God and his risen Christ; back to the low- 
est place, and was bidden to the highest; back to the 
fisher's cottage, and there the way lay to the many 
mansions; back to the inland lake, and its outflow was 
that river the streams whereof make glad the city of 
God. 

He found through his treason that Simon Peter was 
a very poor stick for the pilgrimage, when it was all 
and only Simon Peter, bent on being the greatest after 
the king in the new kingdom of God on the earth. 

But the old pride in Peter had passed away, I take 
it; and he had no ambition then beyond a simple and 
manful life. And a weary way it was from that 
turning! but it lay straight and true for him from 
there to the eternal home, — a lonely way, yet it was 
peopled for him with the dear divine presence and the 
celestial companions; and a sad way often, but then 
the joy was so much more than the sorrow; and a way 
terrible to the flesh as walking, through fire. Yet, 



Why Simon Peter went a-fishing 151 



they say, he begged for the boon of a deeper misery 
when he must die, which would set the seal for all 
time and to all men touching the perfect sincerity of 
his sorrow for the great treason in the hall so long 
ago, for which the dear divine Friend had long ago 
forgiven him, but for which he had never forgiven 
himself; and then all heaven came into his heart, and 
shone from his eyes. 

Faith was perfected, hope soared far above the 
boundaries of earth and time, and love was one with 
faith and hope, and their glory and crown, and all 
harking back, if we will but think of it, to that time 
when the poor tried man said, ''I go a-fishing." 

Many years ago, in a great historic city, I went to 
see a picture painted by Rubens for the church where 
he was baptized. It was the altar-piece, and I must 
pay a fee to see it. I had been paying money right 
and left all day to see things until I was as cross as 
a bear and sick of the whole business. Still, I must 
see it on their terms, so they turned it to the light 
of the setting sun. And I remember how I stood there 
in the silence for a few moments to find I was sobbing 
and trying to force back my tears. It is the picture of 
Peter's death on the cross, as he had prayed he might 
die, and, as you look, the pain smites you as with a 
solid stroke; but this was not the reason for the tears. 
I saw only those eyes presently in which the master has 
hidden such deeps on deeps of victory, mastering the 
agony, that you stand there in amaze. 

The wonderful clear gray eyes are looking from the 
tree right into the heart of heaven, and the light in 



152 Why Simon Peter went a-fishiftg 

them is more than the shining of the sun. It is the 
light which lights the sun, the light of God. 

He knows nothing of the pain. Death has no do- 
minion there. The curtains of time are fallino:. 
The eternal life fills the fainting and failing heart. 
He is absent already from the body and present with 
the Lord. You feel this is no mere fancy of the mas- 
ter, it is the living truth about the man, caught by 
the hand of genius to touch all hearts; and then you 
think of the lines touching the first martyr, how 

*' Looking upward, full of grace, 
He prayed, and from a happy place 
God's glory smote him on the face." 

And now there are many lessons to be drawn from 
this whole matter for which I have scant time; while 
to me the best of them is this I have tried to open, and 
which rests and turns on the good resolve of the man, 
"I go a-fishing," — that my own true day's duty is the 
most blessed thing for me in all the world. Have I 
been dreaming to my loss and theirs who look to me, 
and done treason through my dreams to God and his 
Christ and to my own soul? Here are the first condi- 
tions of a truer manhood waiting in my sorrow and 
shame in my day's nearest duty. 

Am I in trouble, feeling that all the stanchions and 
safeguards on earth and in heaven have given way? 
The first stroke I can make for a new and nobler 
reality lies for me also in the day's instant and im- 
perative duty. Do the great mysteries touch me 
with their pain of life and death and the life to come? 



Why Simon Peter went a-fi sizing 



153 



I must not go running hither and yonder to have 
them solved. They will open to me while I stand by 
my duty week-day or Sunday and my day's work for 
God and man. 

Is there some grander destiny waiting for me, as 
there was for this man? I can win out of my very 
sin and shame and by rugged ways, and hard as they 
were for him. The princedom, the throne, and the 
crown, rest still and forever on the simple and true 
day's duty and the good day's work, though it be no 
more there and then than this Simon Peter held in 
his heart when he said, "I go a-fishing " : for still 

" The path of duty is the way to glory." 



JOHN THE BELOVED. 



"Lord, what shall this man do?"' — JoHX xxi. 21. 

It was for John the beloved that Peter felt this 
loving concern ; while we may well believe the reason 
for this distinction ''the beloved" would begin to draw 
them together very early in their life, as they were first 
cousins on the mother's side, ]\Iary and Salome being 
sisters, if we are right in our surmises. 

Their love has come to its perfection in the time 
since Jesus found John and his brother busy with their 
boat, and asked them to join him. They went with 
him, as it seems, asking no questions; while from this 
time we can trace the truth that they were nearer to 
each other, and dearer, than all the world beside. 

John was with him in the transfiguration on . the 
mount, leaned on his breast at the last supper, and was 
one of the three nearest to him in the garden ; while 
he was the one man among them all who had fronted 
the danger when the first blind terror was spent and 
he came to himself. He had stood close to the cross 
then, with the hapless women, and had taken his dear 
friend's last will and testament to his heart, that he 
should look after the poor mother who stood beside 
him, heart-broken, and then, when all was over, had 
taken her home to his own house, to love her and care 
for her to the end of her life. 



JoJm tJie Beloved 



155 



So we may see how the matter stands, and how nat- 
ural it would be the good comrade should ask his ques- 
tion, What shall this man do ? The life they have 
lived together through these years has been so blended 
into one life by their love that Peter finds it hard to 
imagine even how the one can be in heaven and the 
other abide so forlorn on the earth. 

How shall he be able now to stand alone, much 
less go on alone, through the years that remain ? and 
so what shall he do ? The time was when he would 
have been able to bear the burden as well as the 
rest of them, or, it may be, better; for he was so 
strong and vital they had called him the Son of 
Thunder, while it was no small thing three years ago 
to give up his living, as Peter had done also, at the 
Master's bidding. But this is giving up his life, as 
it lay in this which was taken while he was left ; and 
so what shall he do t 

John Paul says, when one he loved better than a 
brother was dead, I did not ask why I had lost him, 
but how it was that I should ever have found him''; 
and then he could only be grateful and glad through 
his pain. But no such thought as yet touches the good 
comrade. He has not begun as yet to realize what he 
might still be to them all who had passed through the 
gates of death into the immortal life. He only sees the 
poor friend standing there, as I think of him, a broken 
man, not yet in his full prime; and, if he should live 
through many years yet, what shall he do.^ He has 
lost the personal human presence nearest him in all the 
world, — lost the nobler and better half of himself, 
shall we say, lost what makes his life worth living, 



156 



John the Beloved 



and now the light of the days will never be again 
what it has been, or the joy. He may live, and must; 
but in all he does henceforth they will miss the 
splendid stroke of the Son of Thunder. His strength 
will fail at the spring of its inspiration ; and so what 
shall he do 1 

So I think we should read the truth, as it lies between 
the lines of the question and the answer, who may have 
struck some such sorrow and loss — and then we may see 
how the truth is as old as life — and the severing of these 
close and warm and most loving human ties. 

And as the question. What shall this man do 1 was 
not singular and separate from our life, no more, as I 
think of it, is the answer. This may be as full of all 
heartening to us now, and as true as it was to John the 
beloved, when we fall on this sorrow, though as yet we 
may be no more able to understand or take it home to 
our hearts than he was that day. If I will that he tarry 
till I come, — this is the answer; and then the curtain 
falls on the troubled man who will have to face his 
life, as the good comrade thinks of him, shorn of the 
strength and joy which gave life its choicest w^orth. 

The curtain falls, but it is lifted again, and often, in 
John's long lifetime; and then we can see by glimpses 
and glances what this tarrying means to him, and what 
it may mean to you and me. 

He must wait for his own sake, first of all, as the 
grapes that ripen late must stay on the vines, and the 
fruits long a-mellowing must stay on the tree. For, 
when we follow him in the Gospels down to this day, 
we may see quite easily he is by no means the 
man we think of as John the beloved, because he was 



John the Beloved 



157 



the gentlest and most loving among them all, the man 
who wins his way to their hearts and ours because he 
holds this beautiful gift in present possession through 
a nature which is as the vine clinging and climbing 
sunward by tender tendrils of love which must so hold 
and cling. The dear divine Friend who loves him so 
calls him a Son of Thunder; and such a name can 
hardly have been given to the man we have always in 
our mind. 

The truth is he was a bigot at times of the old, 
stern type, as we may see when we read our Gospels. 
He would have the Master call down fire from heaven 
once, to burn up a town where the folk did not give 
them good welcome, because they were of another 
church and denomination, and had to take the rebuke 
with the rest of them, Ye know not of what spirit I 
am : I have not come to destroy, but to save." And 
again, when he finds one healing the sick who is not 
one of the little band, he will have him hindered ; but 
again the Master rebukes him by the word : He that is 
not against us is for us. Let the man alone." 

This is the John who must tarry, as he stands in 
the Gospels, with his whole love, such as it was, 
centred in the dear Friend and Master alone ; and, 
when we trace him in the early traditions through 
many years of his tarrying, he is still about the same 
man. 

He goes to Ephesus, and falls out sadly, with the 
little church which has been gathered there, on some 
points of doctrine, and falls into something very near 
of kin to a rage. We hear rumors again about his 
helping a mob to destroy one of the heathen temples, 



158 



John the Beloved 



and of his doing some other things which help us to 
see how long the fruit must tarry on the tree of his 
life before it will be ready for the gathering, large, 
ripe, and mellow and sweet to the core, the true graft- 
ing on the true vine. 

But, then, we follow him again, to find quite another 
man, when the time and tarrying have done their per- 
fect work, gentle and loving to our full desire, and 
sweet of heart to the core. 

One of these traditions I love best to read and take 
to my heart. The brigands were out, and were harry- 
ing the farms and homesteads under the leadership of 
a man who had been very dear to him many years be- 
fore, and one of his flock. John the beloved is very 
old and feeble then, they say; but he insists on going 
alone to find this man, and win him back to God and 
holy ways, if loving can do it, and all gentleness. So 
he finds him at last; but he is no more the Son of 
Thunder : he has found the first secret of his tarrying, 
though he shall never find another, that, 

" Except we are growing gentle and good, 
There can be no good in our growing old.'* 

He talks to the brigand, who flees from him at first 
while still he follows, just as the dear Friend would have 
talked to him in the old time. He will not smite the 
iceberg with the thunderbolt of a divine wrath, but 
will melt it, please God, with the love of Christ, which 
is one now with his own ; and so the man breaks down, 
kneels at the old saint's feet, begging to be restored, 
and then returns with him to his home and to a new 
life. 



Johl the Beloved 



159 



Then we watch him through the glass of the tradi- 
tions, a wonder of old age, sitting in the sunshine, with 
a bird on his shoulder which flutters down to feed out 
of his hand ; and the people about him wonder how so 
great a man should love so small a creature. And, 
when the long tarrying is almost over and done with, 
we hear how he will have them carry him to the church 
once more, because he cannot walk now, he is so old 
and feeble. So they take him there, and set him, like 
a child, in the midst ; while all he can say to them is, 
"Little children, love one another," with a sweet and 
beautiful repetition which is perfectly fitting and true 
to him, when you think of the man he was. " Little 
children, love one another.'' This holds all the law 
and the gospel for him now in the ripeness of the hun- 
dred years ; and then we see him no more. He closes 
his dim eyes on this world of ours forever, and goes his 
way to find the dear divine Friend again, who left him 
so long ago. 

So this was what came of the tarrying. The Son of 
Thunder turned into sunbeams of loving kindness and 
tender mercy ; and this was the answer made good to 
the comrade who had thought of him as the one man 
among them all for whom life could hold no more of 
worth, when he said so pathetically, What shall this 
man do ? 

He shall do this, is the answer: he shall grow gentle 
in all gentleness and lovely in all loving, so that the 
old, harsh fires and thunders will be quite forgotten or 
not minded through all time to come, and then leave 
the treasure he has won in a Gospel which shall enrich 
our life forevermore ; for, while we may not be able to 



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Jo Jin the Beloved 



prove to all comers he wrote the Gospel as we have it 
now, we cannot doubt that his heart beats through it, 
and the wealth of his loving memories. 

So I have been moved to touch the question, and 
answer this Easter morning, because the truth they 
hold comes home to so many of us who fall on this 
sore trouble of a severed and broken life, in which we 
seem to have nothing to live for now ; while those who 
think of us, and pity us, may be saying, What shall this 
man do, or this woman, left like a bird in the net, while 
its mate is soaring and singing in the heavens so far 
away?" If the dog cannot live away from his master, 
he can lie down on the grave and die ; and the bird, if 
he takes his loss to heart over-much, you find him dead 
some morning in his cage. They begin again, and 
their life is presently made good to them as ever ; or, if 
they cannot do that, they die. But there is no such 
w^ay out of the trouble for us, save as Heaven makes 
one ; and so what shall we do, this is the question, while 
the answer may come to us in m.any ways, but they all 
centre, first of all, right here about the old blessed 
word. What if they tarry till I come 1 

For does it seem to be indeed a broken life I am 
watching, or possess shorn of the choicest treasure ? 
Then the many years have been teaching me this truth : 
how the time may come to us, if we can wait for it 
patiently, when we do not take hold of life again in the 
old strong fashion, but life takes hold of us in some 
diviner fashion, as it took hold of this John the be- 
loved. 

It is as when you come to the bar and have to wait 
for the tide, which waits for the power from on high. 



John the Beloved 



i6i 



that lends the lift of another world, and, lo ! you are 
in deep water. It is as when we sail away toward the 
old home of the race, and you see some day a faint line 
far away you know is not a cloud ; and then, as the 
night comes on, a light shines, and that means the ful- 
filling of the promise. It is like the grain sown in the 
fall of the year, which sprang into life and the fair 
promise of the harvest home ; but the sun retreated, 
the mists came down, the frosts followed, and the great 
snows lay white on the land. The storm swept over 
all, the growth was stayed, and the hope that is seen 
lay under the hard and bitter- winter. 

But the wheat has been waiting in those poor blue 
blades, hidden down under the drifts, while the roots 
have been growing stronger for the tarrying. And 
now here is the sun returning. While the drifts have 
melted, the blades are taking on their tender green 
again, and shooting forth afresh toward the heavens ; 
and on a day we can well foresee the choice word will 
be said down there in the market, This is winter wheat, 
and the best we handle." The most noble secret of its 
worth lies in the tarrying until the sun returns to draw 
it forth, and the warm rains fall on it : then the ears 
unfold their golden banners in the summer tide, and 
all is well. Yes, and all is well through waiting. 

So, ''What shall this man do, or this woman V we 
may say, with the pathetic concern of the old saint 
in the making. Their life is arrested, their joy is slain, 
their hope has gone out or burns very low and dim, their 
sun has retreated in the heaven of their life, the clouds 
are down on them, and the mists, the frosts, are on 
them, and the snows of winter. What shall they do } 



John the Beloved 



Well, it is written for us all what we shall do. What if 
we shall tarry till he come again, the sun of our hope 
and joy ? 

Nature has her blessed parable ready for our read- 
ing of the holy worth of waiting. So is it true that 
all things come to those who can wait : then here, of 
all the times that can come to us, it is true, here may 
be the finest wealth won by waiting. "I will have 
none of this," the arrested blade may say. '*Let me 
die, and have done with it. I am buried under the 
drift. What is there for me but the end of all hope 
and joy But no," the brave germ answers in the 

heart of all, — not here alone in the highest life and 
divinest, but on all the lines, — "I am not here to die, 
but to wait, and then to live to some finer purpose.'' 

This is where the painter finds his finest pictures, 
the inventor his insight, the preacher his choicest 
word, the true king his power to rule with Alfred in 
the name of the Lord, the President his strength to 
lead the people : these all answer to the parable of the 
brave, enduring grain. 

''No, no,'' the brave heart, and hopeful, answers, *' I 
must bear all this, and wait. There is something for 
me beyond these clouds and mists that lie so heavy, 
these storms and drifts which strike like the stroke of 
doom, yes, and the retreating sun, — something beyond 
and above them all. Ay, and something in them of 
God's treasure, and so I will wait." And then the time 
of fruition comes, and we find as the good old man did 
the worth of the tiny word if he tarry. For the king- 
dom of heaven is as when a man casteth seed into the 
ground, and it springeth and groweth, he knoweth not 



John the Beloved 



163 



how, first the blade, then the ear, and after that the full 
corn in the ear. 

Let me take this Easter lesson to my heart, then, as 
it rests first in the question. What shall this man do ? 
What he did was to tarry, and nourish his heart on the 
faith that the dear and divine Friend would be with him 
always, even unto the end of the world, and then go 
forth in the faith to live his life, to do his work, and to 
learn his lesson, how to become sweet of heart, and gen- 
tle, who had been so often harsh and masterful, how to 
•melt where he would once have burned with fire, and how 
to persuade where aforetime he would have hurled the 
thunderbolt to slay. 

It all came to him, stealing in like the light and 
warmth of the early sun, the life which was hid with 
Christ in God, and won him at last, and held him to all 
gentleness and love. He could have said : What is 
the use waiting 1 I am no good, bare of his presence 
and the clasp of his hand. His breait to lean on, and 
the loving glance from his eyes as we went on our way, 
nay, his very voice in rebuke was more to me than any 
other voice ever was in praise. And so what shall I do 
or what can I do but go lamed and out of heart through 
the years that remain, and then die.'^" 

But he held up his head and his heart to face life 
again, and waited ; and then he found life was waiting 
for him, and the work to which he had been called and 
elected. 

He had been a follower. He had done with this, 
and must be a leader in the holy way of life and of 
God. An inquisitor he must be, a man with a heart in 
him, great, generous, and hospitable toward all good- 



164 



John the Beloved 



ness and truth ; for this lay in the sealed orders, ''If he 
tarry till I come." He had been a bitter partisan in 
spots : he must grow catholic as God's sunshine. He 
was always strong : he must learn now to be gentle. 
He must be to the waiting world in his stead who 
came to show us the Father, and then all the beatitudes 
fell like the gentle rains upon his good white head. 

And, then, if I may touch one more tradition, a day 
came when they gathered from far and wide to where 
his home was, and said to him : You are the last man 
on the earth who saw the Master, and were nearest to 
him of all the disciples. But these reports we have 
of him as he lived and spoke do not seem to tell the 
great divine story in all its fulness. They are very good, 
as far as they go ; but something is left out. We have 
heard you tell how he washed your feet once, just before 
he was taken away ; and there were many wonderful and 
comfortable words he said in those last days we have 
heard you repeat these many years, for you seem to forget 
nothing which belongs to the far-away time. Now may 
we not write it all down from your own lips before you 
leave us to find him who has risen and is with God 1 " 
Well it was so they tell us who handed down the tradi- 
tions, and so we have this Gospel of the loving heart 
which finds its spring-head in the heart of John the 
beloved. 

And now, to us all who will, this may be the tenor, 
the treasure, and the blessedness of our waiting when 
the human tie is broken, — that, through our patience 
and faith, it may become divine. 

We can live so nobly, not in despite of the great sor- 
rows and bereavements, but because of them, that our 



John the Beloved 



life shall be a gospel, though we can never write or 
frame one with our lips. 

Some do not grow larger of heart and life, and sweeter, 
but sterner and more bitter; and then, alas! for the 
tarrying. But others grow, as this man did, gentle and 
fair and full of all charity, pouring out their pent-up 
love on the many they had given to one who is no more ; 
and then that is their answer to the question, What 
shall this man do, or that woman } They are in their 
way as he was in our sister city, who, when his one 
daughter died in her early beautiful womanhood, poured 
out his wealth and what remained of his life, to help 
and bless unnumbered women through all time. 

They are as she was, the lady of the far-away ages, 
who had one son, the darling of her heart, but he died 
in a sudden disaster ; and when the shepherd, who had 
seen the disaster from afar, came into her presence 
and said, Lady, what is good for a bootless bene.'^" 
she answered, Endless sorrow." For she saw in his 
eyes what he had not the heart to tell her, that her 
darling was dead ; and then she said, " Many a poor 
man's son shall be rich through my loss and glad 
through my sorrow.'' So it was, and this was the 
fruitage of her tarrying ; and so we may see how we 
may go forth weeping, bearing precious seed, to return 
again rejoicing, bringing our sheaves with us, — the 
sheaves of the winter wheat, — when, 

" Beneath the dark November sky, 
With the cold rain falling drearily, 
The seed on the land is cast ; 
And in the furrows the grain doth lie 
Till the wintry months be past. 



John the Beloved 



Sown in the cold, dark, desolate days, 

Reaped in the sunshine's mellow haze : 

Thus in the deep and wond'rous ways 

Of God are the lives of men, — 

Sorrow and loss, defeats and delays, 

Like the storms that nurture the grain. 

That which was sown in wintry air 

Shall blossom and ripen when skies are fair. 

Though thine shall be many an anxious care 

Ere the harvest be gathered in. 

So be strong to do, and patient to bear, 

For the heart that is true shall win." 



SEEING GOD AFTERWARD. 



" Thou shalt see me afterward, but my face shall not be seen." 
Exodus xxxiii. 23. 

When the man Moses uttered this prayer, he was 
passing through a great and sore crisis in his life. He 
had been forty days alone, as we read, in the fastnesses 
of Horeb, brooding over the things which took shape 
finally in the ten commandments; and, as he com.muned 
with God in the solitude, a divine inspiration touched 
him, as he believed, and as I believe, to cast them into 
this form and set on them the seal of the divine 
sanction. 

That such a stroke of work should have cost him 
very dear and lifted him high is no wonder ; and so we 
are told that, when he came down from the mountain, 
his face shone with the light which is not of the sun. 
But he came down only to find that the tribes he had 
fought for so bravely and loved so well had fallen back 
into the gross idolatry from which he had done all in 
his power to deliver them. 

This was a fearful blow to him, no doubt ; and we 
must not wonder that the spirit in him, strung to its 
utmost tension and worn out with the lonof fasting:, 
should break out into a mighty rage, in which he burned 



Seeing God Afterward 



up their golden calf, ground the cinders to powder, 
defiled the wells with it, made the leaders in the revolt 
drink the bitter waters, and served them right. But, 
when all this was done, a reaction set in ; and he went 
up into the mountains again, quite broken down, as it 
seems, and in sore doubt whether it was of any use 
trying to do any more for his people. 

And this is the time touched in my text. The 
assurances which had made his heart so strong afore- 
time were like music which has lost its melody. The 
great deliverance had been wrought to no true purpose, 
while he was waiting again for the voice which had 
inspired and directed him from the days of the burning 
bush ; but as yet there was no voice for him, and no 
vision, only clouds and a darkness which seemed to 
hide God away, as if a web was woven across the sky. 

I think it was very much like our own case on some 
sad November day, when the vault which bends over 
the spirit seems for the time to be as bleak as that 
which bends over the world, and our hopes and striv- 
ings are like the leaves we are beating into the mire 
under our feet; and so it was that he wanted what we 
all want, when we are in this sore stress of the soul, 
and life grows dark in the shadows touched with de- 
spair. He wanted the very present sense and sight of 
God, which would burn through the darkness and dis- 
may once for all, and set his soul singing of her confi- 
dence, as a lark sings far up in the heavens on a fair 
June morning. Then he could go back to his life and 
his work again down there in the desert as law-giver 
and leader, no matter what might befall. And so he 
cries, ''I beseech thee, shew me thy glory." 



Seeing God Afterward 



169 



But there is no worth to me, as I watch him stand- 
ing there, in the thought that Jehovah cares no more 
for this cry than the great sphinx cared for those who 
would bend and pray before her stone-dead presence 
on the Nile. I love to believe that the heart of Him 
who pitieth his children yearned over the sorrow- 
stricken man, and the Father said in his heaven : I 
would love to do this for you if it was the best, but this 
cannot be. I must put you, for your own sake, in the 
cleft of the rock, cover you with my hand, and narrow 
down all your seeing to the place where you stand 
when I pass by ; but, then, you shall know this : that it is 
my hand which has placed you there, and covers you in. 
And then, when it is dark all about and above you, I will 
still be near, and nearest when it is darkest ; and you 
shall see me afterward." 

This is to me the true interpretation of the passage 
between the man and the Most High, the child and 
the Father, in the dim old days ; while, once more, 
to me there is nothing literal in the report as it stands, 
or objective, as we say, beyond this of the man stand- 
ing there, and crying out to God in his great and sore 
trouble. 

I have heard how they pretend to show you still 
the very cleft in which he was hidden ; but to me 
the only reality about it all is very much that you 
would find if you went to look for Bunyan's Slough of 
Despond near the dungeon by Bedford Bridge. 

It is a report sent down to us touching one of the 
grandest and most pregnant truths we can ever take to 
our own hearts in our own personal experience, and 
then, not in this alone ; for we may find the same 



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Seeing God Afterivard 



truth in the highest and broadest revelations of his 
eternal providence, that we see him afterward rather 
than there and then, in the processes of nature 
and the life of the race and the nations, as well as in 
our ov/n. 

And in our own life, when this befalls us, we may 
feel as this man ]\Ioses did that we should be able to 
go right on with a high heart, and strong, if He, the 
Holy One, would reveal his presence to us beyond all 
doubt or question, while we must break down and give 
up if we cannot behold this glory. Yet all he will or 
can do for us there and then will be to put us in the 
cleft of the rock, and cover us with his hand while he 
passeth by; but, then, the day comes for us, also, when 
we can see how the darkness has nurtured a faith 
which that we desire might have slain, as the darkness 
in which they must be hidden nurtures the roots and 
seeds of all things, and causes them to bloom forth 
into the fair glory of the summer. 

In the processes of nature, I said, this truth may be 
found first of all, and the creation of the world, in 
which the invisible things of him, as Paul says, are 
clearly seen, being set forth by the things which are 
made. 

For, when we feel our way through the measureless 
eras which reach inward and downward toward the 
central fires, we can be w^ell aware, at every step we 
take, how poor and dim our sense of the divine pres- 
ence and providence must have been if we could have 
seen what was done while the Creator was bending 
over those retorts and furnaces, storing up the rocks 
and minerals, brooding over the savannahs and seas, and 



Seeing God Afterward 



171 



calling forth the swarms of living creatures which were 
all to take life and life's worth from his hand, and then 
to pass away. 

What does it mean, we should have said, — this 
life which is forever drifting down to death ? Why do 
these forests stand in the sun, to be torn up by the 
tornadoes and buried by the convulsions which are 
forever shaking the world ? Why do these fires burn 
and these waters swirl ? and why are the swarms of liv- 
ing creatures sent, shuddering, back to the dust ? What 
does it all mean ? Who can watch these things that 
are made, and believe God is also watching, and holding 
such a world in the hollow of his hand ? This would 
have been the fruitage of our seeing ; but now the time 
has come, — the great and wonderful afterward. 

Man comes forth in the full time to make this world 
his home ; and then, slowly, but surely, the truth begins 
to grow clear touching the creation. These forests 
stood in the sun, through the untold ages, that they 
might store up his fires, while the tornadoes and con- 
vulsions hid them away until the time came to reveal 
them ; and untold precious things came forth from the 
retorts and furnaces, also to bide their time. Nothing 
lay outside the boundaries of his kingdom in the crea- 
tion, 

" Not a worm was cloven in vain, 
And not a moth with vain desire 
Was shrivelled in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserved another's gain." 

Now we can see what hand shaped and moulded the 
foundations of the world. The pebble at our feet tells 
the story, the coal in our fires, the treasures in our 



1/2 



Seeing God Afterward 



mines, the marble gleaming in the palaces, the very 
whitewash on our cottage walls. He has taken his 
hand away from the cleft in the rock, and we see him 
afterward. 

Or shall we notice, again, how this great and noble 
verity may come home to us in the advent of our 
human race } 

The elders who hear me can well remember the 
storm brewed and blown from our pulpits and presses 
when geology came into our courts, and began to 
question, with bated breath, the interpretations that 
had been given, time out of mind, touching the crea- 
tion of the world in six proper days, — say some six 
thousand years ago. ''They were rank infidelity," they 
cried, ''these oppositions of science, falsely so called, to 
the holy truth : they were the spawn of the pit." Well, 
that storm has long since blown itself out, and we are 
rapidly forgetting that there ever was one. 

And now, in these later years, here is another blowing 
from the same quarter over the advent of man. Gleams 
of light growing from dim toward the dawn are coming 
to us, from which we begin to be aware of this, — that 
the race also has been in the cleft of the rock, with 
the darkness all about and above, and these truths we 
are to find, which touch the ascent of man, are in the 
divine order which built up the planet from the fires 
and fogs of the most primitive eras to the glory we wit- 
ness in the summer tide, from the old red granite to 
the June roses, and from the monsters of the early 
world to the orioles and the thrushes brooding and 
singing over their, nests. 

So, while we may still say, " It doth not yet appear 



Seeing God Afterward 



173 



what we have been, any more than it appears what we 
shall be, as we wait for the afterward here and yonder," 
to me these glimpses and glances toward the truth of 
the advent of the human race seem like the music in 
the grand oratorio of the Creation/' which begins 
with a clash and clang of discords, reaching upward 
toward the enthralling melodies of heaven. 

We must not fear, therefore, what the students in 
this science may have to tell us for the truth on this 
question, or the cry of heresy and infidelity from the 
old quarter, which is growing fainter with every year; 
for, if they have caught the true thread of the maze 
and mystery, the truth they still have to tell us will 
not be alone a revelation of the past, but a glorious 
prophecy of the future of man. Because, if we were 
by no means set in the dim and far beginning on the 
summit of 

" The great world's altar-stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God," 

but began at the lowest base to climb, step by step, 
from where we were then to where we are now, we 
may well believe we are still climbing, and shall keep 
on until we reach the throne. 

We must harbor no fear about this man-child of God, 
whose whole record so far is strewn with the broidery 
of the golden word "success." And I feel free to 
confess that it is the far more welcome truth to me 
to believe that I sprang from a monad, — whatever 
that may be, — which held its own down there in the 
cleft, and struck for something better because a divine 
pang touched it, — struck for something better, and 



174 



Seeing God Afterward 



kept on striking, — than it is to believe in him we hear 
of, who was set in the beginning on the summit, and 
thence came clown headlong, dragging untold myriads 
in his fall down to ''darkness, death, and long despair." 
Between a man like that and a monad, give me the 
monad. 

So it is not retrospect alone, but prophecy, also, we 
touch through these intimations of the race in the 
cleft of the rock. We may well believe we are but a 
few steps on our way up the ladder which reaches from 
earth to heaven ; but we are climbing age by age, — for 
this is our doom and our glory, — and so well the great 
apostle says, ''The whole creation groaneth and travail- 
eth in pain together until now." And not only they but 
ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of the spirit, 
— even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting 
for our adoption, — to wit, the redemption of our body; 
for we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen is not 
hope ; for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? 
But, if we hope for that we see not, then do we w^ith 
patience wait for it, in the hope that the creation itself 
also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption 
into the glorious liberty of the children of God. 

I would notice how this is the truth, once more, touch- 
ing the nations and the times when they are in the 
cleft of the rock. Napoleon tears Germany limb from 
limb in the early years of our century, crushes Berlin 
under his heel, and covers Prussia as with a pall. The 
genius of the great German manhood is in the cleft of 
the rock, where she can see no face of God; but out of 
that cleft the strong manhood comes forth to do its des- 
tined work. Bismarck was born there, the greatest 



Seeing God Afterward 



175 



statesman since Cromwell and Von Moltke and the 
good William, the Emperor. 

The German manhood grew great and masterful in 
the darkness, as she must, or her great day was a 
thing of the past. She had sunk so low that she was 
worshipping not one golden calf, but a host of them ; 
and then the new manhood which was to grind these 
to powder came out of the darkness and the cleft. 

I mind how I grew curious once about **The Watch 
on the Rhine," and wanted to catch its secret of power 
over the Germ.an heart all about us. So I said one day 
to a master in music, Play for me, please, your 
national melody on the great organ, and shake the 
church with it, if you can." We were alone in the 
church; and I noticed how his face flushed and his 
eyes shone as he answered, "I will try," and then 
how for a few moments he seemed to be dreaming 
while he touched the keys ; and then how the mighty 
chords began to fill and flood the place, so that, at last, 
it seemed as if Miriam was singing the song of Moses 
for the deliverance of Israel from the thrall. It was 
the music of the new manhood led out of the cleft and 
reaming with the new life. There was no face of God 
for Germany when those dark days were on her, but 
she saw him afterward. 

And as it was with Germany, so it was with France 
in her turn, when liberty turned to libertinism under the 
usurper, and she fell down and worshipped the golden 
calf. And what a calf that was, to be sure ! It was 
the time for her true manhood to abide in the cleft. 
There was no hope for France wallowing in the slough 
of the Second Empire. But now we begin to see that 



1/6 



Seeing God Afterward 



the divine hand was over and about her in the dark 
days when her beautiful capital was invested all about ; 
and she is coming forth now to reveal a nobler life than 
she has ever known since she was a nation, because 
France also holds a treasure in her heart of a priceless 
worth to the world, — a genius unique as it is beautiful 
at its best among the nations of the earth. 

So it was again when we went after a cotton calf, 
and had to swallow the bitter burnt ashes of our na- 
tion's idol. We were in the cleft, then, with our 
father Abraham, with the darkness about and above 
him ; while he must wonder in his good, patient heart 
when the darkness would pass away. 

The light came for us when he made his great Proc- 
lamation and the flag was unfurled for freedom and the 
integrity of the whole nation, the image of God in 
ebony as in ivory. Then the waters of our Jordan 
began to part for us this way and that, and we came to 
our rest. Not more surely did God put the man Moses 
into the cleft than he put the man Abraham Lincoln 
there ; and not more surely was he with his son in the 
old time, when he said, ^'Get thee up into the moun- 
tain," and showed him the promised land he must not 
enter, standing in the sunlight of the new and better 
time, than he was with our great leader when his work 
was done and he was swept away suddenly to his rest, 
when the arm of the assassin was transformed into the 
chariot of fire. 

And so, I think, we come through glimpses and 
glances such as these to bring this truth of the cleft 
home, and see what lessons we can learn from it when 
the darkness is above us, and the walls about us, and 
we cry also, I beseech thee, shew me thy glory." 



Seeing God Afterward 



177 



Nor can we do better, as my thought runs, than to 
cleave still to the Sacred Book for our first lesson of 
help and heartening, and notice how it came to be the 
proudest boast of Israel, We have Abraham to our 
father"; while such light as shines on his life for us 
now reveals a man often in the cleft of the rock, — a 
man who must be content to catch glimpses of God's 
presence through the crevices and crannies of a dream, 
and in watching the signs of the sacrifice, because 
there is no sure word for him and no open vision, and 
who came wandering from afar in the faith that the 
land of promise lay at the end of his quest. 

For had not the assurance come right from the 
mouth of God that he should possess the land, and his 
children should be as the sands on the seashore and 
as the stars for multitude, to find that the whole worth 
of the promises had dwindled down at last to a son, 
getting well on in years, who had not the pluck in him, 
and courage, to break away from the tents and the 
mother's apron-string to find the maiden who was to be 
his wife ? 

And here, again, is the divinest life the world has 
ever held, which shines from the eyes and beats in the 
heart of Jesus Christ. But, if that light had shone on 
our world then as it shines now, think you that Peter 
would have blasphemed and told the lie when the dam- 
sel said, **This man also was with him," or Judas be- 
trayed him with a kiss, or Pilate have condemned him, 
for all their clamor .^^ I tell you nay. They would 
have borne him on their hearts as the most blessed 
revelation of God's face that had ever come to men. 
No diadem would have been too rich wherewith to 



178 



Seeing God Afterwai'd 



crown him, and no purple too royal for his robe. They 
would have knelt to do him homage as he walked about 
the streets ; while the high-priest would have met him 
at the temple gates, and prayed him to enter the most 
holy place, that the lights on the golden candlesticks 
might burn forever with a clearer lustre, and the glory 
on the wings of the cherubim be like that of the angels 
of the presence nearest the throne. 

And this light which shines now from his Gospels, is 
it not wide as the world and high as heaven } Yet he 
also was in the cleft, as he hung there on the cross and 
cried, ''My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me } " And yet unto him also came the divine worth 
of the darkness, when he never imagines for an instant 
that he can forsake God. 

And so I might go on to tell you how this is the 
truth touching the most royal souls who have come to 
help and hearten us in all time. There was not a man 
or a woman of them all who had not to stand in the 
cleft of the rock, longing to see God's face, to catch 
some glimpse, if no more, of the grand, luminous, 
infinite truth, that they might go right on with never 
a doubt or fear. What they wanted through the light 
came to them by the darkness, when all they had to 
hold them was their faith in the unseen. Yet this was 
to them as when the sun touches a seed far down in a 
crevice in the massive walls of some temple of the old 
idolatries, where the seed grows and burgeons and be- 
comes a thing so mighty that the walls split and 
shudder down, and the idols follow the idolatries into 
the dust. 

So in our own life the time comes to us all who are 



5 



Seeing God Aftei'wurd 



179 



alive unto God when we must stand in the cleft, with 
the walls of hindrance all about, and the darkness 
above and before. Yet these may be among the very 
choicest days in all our life, the days when we make 
a nobler faith our own. 

" And He is with us in the night 
Who makes the darkness and the light, 
And dwells not in the light alone." 

So, if I have touched the truth, what better can befall 
us than that we should also be set in the cleft, and be 
brave there and patient, that we may learn the holy 
lesson the noblest and best have had to learn } 

We also may long and cry then to see God's face, and 
say to ourselves : One moment of such clear vision 
would carry us also through the wilderness, singing, to 
our rest. But it is all so dim we would have so clear,'* 
we say; "and what shall we do ?" Dim, dim! Well, 
so it was with the planet, with the race, with the na- 
tions, and the seers and saints. They all had to wait 
for the great and sure Afterward in so many ways. 
Why, then, should not we wait as those that wait for 
the morning, and nourish through all doubt and dismay 
our faith in his presence and in the blessedness of the 
overshadowing hand t 

And take the truth of it all to our hearts, finally, for 
the work God has given us to do as his witnesses and 
apostles of the broad and sunny faith we love. It is 
the old cry of the apostle here that we have not al- 
ready attained, and the brand we have borne, that 
there is nothing clear and well defined in our beliefs 
as there is in those of other churches, no creed worth 



i8o Seeing God Afterward 



the name which embodies them, and I know not what 
besides, and do not care to ask. Well, let it be 
true that we are in the cleft of the rock until now. 
Then, if we are faithful, we shall come forth as a church 
of the living God, strong to do his work in this world, 
and help bring in his kingdom. We cannot see his 
face, but we shall see him afterward. We are in the 
clasp of the holy law. 



THE JOY IN HARVEST. 



" The joy in harvest." — Isaiah ix. 3. 

There is no time in the year more welcome to some 
of us than the fall. We find our sense of its charm 
grows deeper as the years steal on toward our own 
November, and the setting in of winter in our human 
life, because our love for this fair world changes as we 
change, and stands true to all the seasons. 

And so ray very earliest memories are those of a 
child's delight in the early spring, when we went out to 
find the first snowdrops and the willow blooms that 
glorify Palm Sunday, and after these the primrose and 
cowslip, in the old mother land, with the hawthorn, the 
apple-blossom, the golden gorse, and the early wild rose. 
The spring-time struck the first note of joy; and then, 
as my own youth passed away, the summer tides ran 
through my heart, deep answering unto deep, as they 
do in us all when our mother Nature has her way 
with us and we live close to her heart. 

And, then, it was the fall ; but here I found dismay, — 
not as yet in the season, for I was not there only in the 
anticipation. 

I had fallen in with the thought that Nature grows 
sick in the fall, and the pillars of fire she lifts in the 
woods are the hectic flush which warns us that the 



The Joy in Harvest 



end is near. So I had imagined until on one rare 
day I fell in with a saint and seer a good deal older 
than I was then. It was a day when this flush and 
flame pervaded the woods and wild uplands ; and so 
I began to talk in the old sad fashion about this sight, 
and cited proof from the Scriptures touching the life of 
man, as, ''We all do fade as a leaf." But the old seer 
was in the fall himself then, while I was still in the 
summer, and opened another argument drawn from his 
own experience. I used to think very much as you 
do," he said, ''when it was the summer-time with me; 
but now I love to believe that this season is the ripe 
splendor and glory of the year, and not the dissolution, 
but the consummation, of all things, when we look well 
into the heart of Nature through the glass of the good 
providence of God." 

It was a lesson for a lifetime. As these autumn 
days come with their message to us all, when the time 
is ripe for the flaming banners to flash out and all 
things have come to their fine and full perfection that 
are true to the time, we may say, also, " These are 
not the signs of dissolution, but of consummation, 
and not a threnody of death, but a psalm of life, 
when the mornings are silvered by the breath of the 
early frosts, and the flowers in our gardens seem like 
cups of fire which hold all the glory of the spring and 
the summer in their heart, and the air holds a golden 
mist and fragrance exhaled from the flowers, the fruits, 
and the harvest store. 

In the spring the world all about us wakes up, and 
rises to welcome the new day ; but the winter dies hard 
on our zone, and we often ask each other whether this 



The Joy in Harvest 



183 



year there will be any spring worth the name. And 
through the summer the green things growing have to 
fight stern battles for their life. It is too dry, and they 
will wither on the stem. It is too wet, and they will rot 
in the furrows. The blight is on the berry, and the sting 
is in the plum. The apples are shaken down in the 
strong winds, and the roots in the gardens are in peril 
from the evil things that burrow in the dark, mildew 
and rust is in the air ; and the good man on the farm 
fears for his wheat, or wonders how the corn will fare 
in the early frosts, or is aware how the soft rains may 
turn to bullets of ice in the very heart of August, cr 
the canker-worm may eat what the locust has left. 

But now the fall comes when the long fight is over, 
and we know once more there is seed for the sower and 
bread for the eater. The grapes are full of new wine, 
and the barns bulge with the fruits of the harvest. The 
word of the Lord has come true : I will fill thee with 
the fine wheat." He has watered the hills from his 
chambers, and the earth is satisfied with the fruit of 
his hands. He has caused the grass to grow for the 
cattle, and the herb for the service of man. We are at 
one with the wise old husbandman they told me about 
over the water, who farmed much land and never found 
fault with the seasons, but would tell you how he had 
noticed in his many years that what we call a bad 
season for one thing was good for another. 

So we say, if the true heart is in us when the fall 
comes round : The divine Husbandman has been help- 
ing us, and working with us, stroke for stroke. This 
small planet of ours has been swinging through her orbit 
on no mild adventure. The wind, blowing where it list- 



The Joy in Harvest 



eth, has still been as the breath of the Most High ; and 
his hand hath opened the chambers of heaven, and dis- 
tilled the rains. 

Let the year fall on sleep now : she has wrought 
nobly, and deserves her rest. This is the consumma- 
tion : the trees aflame with gold and crimson, and the 
flowers, are the tokens to us that there is no more 
death, but a change from glory to glory, as by the 
spirit of the Lord." And so I love the fall now, when 
I am in it, for the message of the consummation we 
find in its heart, which holds the promise of another 
spring, when 

Earth is full of heaven, 

And every common bush afire with God." 

It deepens and widens our joy, once more, to believe 
how much greater the harvest of God is, who satisfieth 
the desires of every living thing, than this we reckon 
on and weigh and measure for our own. It will be a 
hard winter," ancient men say, who live on the land : ''see 
what a wealth of things are ripening for the birds and 
the squirrels." The foretelling does not always come 
true ; but I like to hear them say so, because it reveals 
a certain faith in the heart which dwells with these 
things, which looks toward the promise, ''As thy day 
is, so shall thy strength be," and which reaches away 
down to the sparrow, and makes him our commentator 
for the divine lesson in the Sermon on the Mount, — 
that every bird has his own provision and the harvests 
of heaven reach from pole to pole. 

In the early days in Virginia they offered a bounty 
for killing the crows, because they ate up the new- 



The Joy hi Harvest 



sown seed. So the creatures fled into the wilderness 
for dear life, and waited on God's hand ; and then in no 
long time the Assembly offered a bounty to get them 
back again, because it had become a question of no 
crow, no corn. They were watchmen, when the whole 
truth came out, and must have their wages. 

And John Burroughs says, " The lark I was looking 
at the other day has a brain one-third larger by pro- 
portion with his body than Shakspere or Webster.'* 
It is the pledge that the great mother will see to her 
nurslings by fitting them forth so handsomely to see 
after themselves. 

*'We do not suspect," Darwin says, again, "how 
ignorant we are of the conditions of existence among 
the creatures on which we are in the habit of looking 
down " ; but we may all learn something, as we see how 
he the old saga calls the First Provider gives them all 
their meat in due season, and think how the harvest on 
which they rely has ripened day by day with ours. It 
ripens for them from the Iceland moss to the palm-trees 
on the equator. 

The boys race with the squirrels for the nuts, and 
the birds for the berries. There is plenty for them 
all, and to spare. The King's messengers are among 
the highways and hedges, bidding the poorest and 
most forlorn to the feast ; and all living things are 
bound up in the bundle of life with him, while man has 
only the pre-eminence and distinction of keeping order 
within the boundaries of his own commonwealth, and 
then the holy Providence sees to the rest by nature's 
ample laws. 

So nothing is made in vain, I say, when I touch 



1 86 The Joy in Harvest 

the truth of the noble consummation ; and nothing is 
made in vain. The Canada thistle is as beautiful and 
good in its own proper place as the rose of Sharon. 
And what a loathsome creature is your crocodile ! 
What an uproar there would be if one was found in any 
of the great reservoirs, whence the water flows into the 
homes of our cities ! They tell me they care for them 
as constantly in the reservoirs in Ceylon as our fine 
ladies care for those deplorable lap-dogs, because the 
water, under their fervid sun, would slay them but for 
the crocodile. 

It is a hint, and no more, of the great harvest of 
God, which rounds and ripens through all the world, 
and holds within its zones a touch of his own infinity. 
There are creatures which need a forest for food and 
house-room. There are hosts I cannot see living 
within the cup of a lily or a violet. ''These all wait 
on him, and he giveth them their meat in due sea- 
son " ; and all's right with the world when we are 
right in it. Why should we grow sad, then, when the 
golden glow falls about us in these autumn days, like a 
garment woven in celestial looms 1 

It may well deepen and widen our joy, again, to think 
what a wealth of difference and distinction comes with 
this matchless bounty, and how it all answers to a need 
or ministers to a delight. 

I had a dear friend once who would have nothing 
to do with the strawberries which came to us in the 
winter, because, he held, they must ripen within a 
degree of his own garden, and in the sun, while -they 
were only at their best when you can pluck them 
from your own vines. And, wandering with him once 



Tlie Joy in Harvest 



187 



in the Old World, I noticed he would only eat what 
wholesome people were eating, where we went, and 
drink, as a rule, what they were drinking. We 
drop in on a visit," he would say, but they have been 
here time out of mind, learning what was good for them 
from the good mother Nature, and taking it from her 
hand." It was his way of touching the difference and 
distinction which lies along all the latitudes and longi- 
tudes, his conception of the trees of life, the seer saw, 
which yield their fruit every month, and whose leaves 
are for the healing of the nations. 

They tell us the apple has never been found within 
the tropics of its own free will, or the orange where you 
can cut ice, and each is the match for the man who lives 
here or yonder. What do you miss in your fruit I 
said once to a friend who lives far away to the south- 
ward. " The snap and tang of the winter," he an- 
swered. He was raised in Massachusetts ; but the na- 
tive man down there would never have made that 
answer. 

We fight stern battles for our harvest stores, and win 
a wealth of sturdy manhood with them, which is making 
us the rulers of the world ; but the children of the soft 
and sunny climes fight no such battles, and even the 
ants, where the sun is most fervid, turn their backs on 
Solomon. They will do nothing in the glare of the day, 
or lay up stores for the winter which never comes. The 
bread fruit, the palm, and the banana grow almost with- 
out a thought or care. The thinking is of close kin to 
the demand. The great domed brain of a man like 
Webster is never nourished forth on the bread fruit and 
the palm. The salmon will only haunt cold waters : he 
is the match and marrow of cold weather. 



i88 



The Joy iii Harvest 



We can exchange what we have for what they have, 
and so enlarge the boundaries of worth and enjoyment, 
but the main truth is this : that each zone reveals the 
wonder of bread enough, and then of the bread the 
man needs who dwells there, or he could not stay ; and 
the saying of the prophet comes forever true: ''I will 
hear the heavens," saith the Lord, ''and the heavens 
shall hear the earth, and the earth shall hear the corn 
and wine and oil, and they shall hear Jezreel," — the 
sown of ■ God. 

It is the next great joy, then, — this of the differ- 
ence and distinction in w^hich all his gifts are as the 
bread which cometh down from heaven ; and how well 
our children answer to this law, who rebel against a 
gray monotony even of good things, when in our foolish 
wisdom we would shut them up in some theory or 
dogma we have stolen from a book perchance, done 
by a man who has quite forgotten his own childhood, 
or had none worth the name ! 

The joy of harvest should grow deep and radiant in 
all our hearts, again, when we think of the bounty and 
blessing it brings to the nations as well as to our own 
home land. 

The sun shines on no home within the American 
republic where there may not be bread enough, and 
to spare, if the bread-winner will see to it, and quit 
himself like a man ; nor is there any home where the 
bread-winner is disabled or dead in which there will 
not be bread enough, when the need is once made 
known ; while in the Old World there is hardly a 
poor man's platter on which you shall not find w^hat is 
to him a new plenty, because of the ploughman and 



The Joy in Harvest i8g 

herdsman of these States. And so the ploughman and 
herdsman, as good Jeremy Taylor says, are also minis- 
ters of God. 

The long sad cry of the poor for bread is stayed now, 
as it never was before, especially in our own mother 
lands; and we are God's bread-winners and bread- 
breakers for the nations. But woe to us if we do not 
find some way to meet and master the shameful things 
which are done so often, through which every poor 
man's loaf is made lighter and our fair commerce 
shamed ! 

In the lawless ages they followed 

" The good old rule, the simple plan, 
That he shall take who has the power, 
And he shall keep who can." 

They would swoop down from their strongholds then 
and take toll of the merchants as they went on their way 
to the markets ; and they must submit, because might 
made right. We call the strongholds a corner" now 
or a syndicate or a trust ; but the things they do are 
often no better, and I wish I could believe not seldom 
they are no worse. 

Still, the truth abides that our land is flooded with 
plenty. There is seed for the sower, and bread for 
the eater. He who ruleth in the heavens hears the cry 
of all the creatures of his hand ; and to all he not only 
giveth meat in due season, but the due meat. We can 
help the world, while still we help ourselves ; and, if we 
stand true to the holy law of neighbor to neighbor and 
man to man, we can make the whole world brighter by 
our bounty, and cause it to rejoice in our joy. 



I go The Joy in Hmuest 



And, then, we may well ask once more what truth 
these things, which are seen and temporal, can bring 
home to us all, touching the things which are unseen 
and eternal, and find this among the first we have 
glanced at for an instant already, — that this world of 
ours swings on in no blind fashion, but is held to its 
course by the hand of the 3yIost High. 

A fearful thing it is, indeed, to think of this home of 
ours threading its way among the constellations, balanc- 
ing itself between the sun and the infinite dark void, 
and of the imprisoned elements, and what would befall 
if they broke loose utterly ; for where would these 
autumn glories be then, with the harvests and homes, 
and with them this marvellous human creature, man, 
He has made a little liigJicr than the angels, and 
crowned with glory and honor? 

It is onlv fearful, and food for any sad foreboding, 
when we leave out of the reckoning His divine pres- 
ence and providence who cares not for the worlds 
alone, but for the lily and the sparrow, and touched me 
with a pang of delight long ago, when I saw the blue- 
bells on the crest of the Rhigi balancing themselves 
against the whole solar system, swinging free in the 
fresh wind of the morning, wet with the rain and 
resplendent in the sun. 

This earth of ours is true to her seasons because God 
is true and steadfast to his divine purpose and plan, 
from whom all things spring, as the fountain springs 
from the great deeps, and has made no mistake in his 
making or lost any thread in the guiding. Let us be 
sure of that, as we rejoice before him in the joy of har- 
vest. It has never been a lost world, but found rather 



The Joy in Harvest 



191 



to a diviner purpose always, and was never so radiant 
with his presence as it is this morning. 

We may lay this truth also to our hearts as we 
grow glad for the harvest home: that, while my joy and 
yours rests in him, it rests also in its own due meas- 
ure with us, as all joy must. We have to win by good, 
honest striving. All the harvest homes worth the 
name are the fruit of such striving, as well as of the 
help of God. I know about where to look for the poor, 
scant harvests a thousand miles from where I stand, 
and I know the reason, which must still be guarded by 
Paul's tender caution, who made thee to differ, why 
there is an abounding grace there, and yonder only dis- 
grace ; and this truth lies within the whole sum and 
substance of our life. 

All the harvests are ours for the striving; and do 
not you forget that, especially, who are in the spring- 
time of what you may be and do. We may have a poor 
lot to work on : it need not stay poor, if we add to our 
faith virtue. We may think we are poor sticks. So 
the poor stick of a willow might have said, my friend 
left on the edge of a marsh and thought no more 
about it. But the wetness touched the dry thing, and 
the sun and the rain fell on it, so tiny spikelets shot 
forth when the spring came ; and, when he took me to 
see it after many years, there was a grand bole, and 
waving banners of green, and the birds were nesting 
and singing far aloft for joy of the tree. 

I love to think of another truth these golden days 
bring home to us all, — the truth that some fruits ripen 
early and some late; and some flowers shed their white 
glory in the spring, while some endure right on to the 



192 



Tlie Joy in Harvest 



frosts of winter, for this is the law of their diverse life. 
Yet how rich the year is through the whole wealth of 
them, the bounty, the beauty, and the fragrance ! And 
so shall we not think of the ingathering of the harvest 
of heaven and the angels ''All too soon," we moaned, 
''all too soon! Why must they be taken?" But the 
blessed truth remains that we had them once, and have 
them still. They are our treasures laid up in heaven. 
They did come to bless us, — the fair fruits and flowers 
of the spring-time and the summer; and we can sing 
with the great singer, then, — 

" This truth came borne with bier and pall, 
I felt it when I sorrowed most, 
'Tis better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all." 

And one last word for the charity that never fail- 
eth. How forbidding some of the good fruits of the 
harvest are on the surface ! How sweet and good in 
the heart ! And how evil a thing it would be to judge 
them only by what we see, or to judge them before their 
time ! 

The fall days come, the frost mellows them, or you 
get at the heart of your hard shell ; and then how 
sweet and good they are, to be sure ! It is of men like 
Milton they remind us, and Johnson or Stephen 
Girard, and hosts of men besides we may have known, 
who needed all the sun there was, and a touch of the 
frost, too. And, then, that time should shred away the 
shell, the sweetness lay not on the surface : it was deep 
in the heart, guarded by the knots or the spikes. I 
say we have all known such men, hard and angular or 



The Joy iit Harvest 



193 



sharp to our touch as a chestnut-burr ; and there would 
have been no great worth, perhaps, if we had broken 
through the shell before the time. 

I made one of these some amends when he was dead, 
but still repent me of my harsh judgment while he was 
alive. No man more honest, but he seemed to be all 
hard shell ; and then men came to me and told me of 
things he had done in the later years, and done in 
secret, the angels of God might envy. Then I said in 
my heart, " If I am worthy to meet that man in heaven, 
when I get through down here, I Vv^ill beg his pardon " ; 
and I still mean to do it. It was the hard shell or the 
chestnut-burr I was scolding and fretting about, and 
wist not of the sweet and shining heart. 

Yes, and let these days teach us some good lessons of 
faith and hope for those that seem to our poor seeing to 
hold no worth in them at all. Long ago I would be 
busy in my overtime among the flowers, and got some 
seed one spring of a rare and unique sort to sow and 
raise a wealth of beauty and fragrance from my seeds. 
But the soil was not good, and the sun came late on that 
side the house, so the promise did not come true. Still, 
a cup or so did flash forth into beauty and grace ; while, 
when the frosts came, I found a seed or two in the 
wreck of my hope, and said : I will save these for 
another summer, and try again. These seeds are the 
proof there will be another summer, if we had no other 
proof." So the spring came, when, having learned 
something by my failure, I set them in a richer tilth 
that lay fairer to the sun ; and, lo ! my flowers were the 
glory of my garden. 

It is the everlasting gospel of the grace of God 



194 



The Joy in Harvest 



which touches our whole life. Not a plant or flower in 
his garden just like another, and no best without a bet- 
ter hanging in the heavens we must capture and bring 
down. 

Yes, and the soil, how harsh and poor it is for some ! 
and the sun, how late he shines for some ! and the things 
that stab and sting, how cruel they are to root and stalk 
in some ! And then we say, " What a wreck ! " But this 
is God's husbandry as well as ours. *'A11 souls are 
mine," saith the Lord ; and if we will but turn to him, 
as my poor flower turned to what sun there was, and 
make the best of the harsh and poor soil in which our 
life may be set to grow, then there shall be a seed saved 
and sown again for the 

" Immortal life in never failing worlds, 
For mortal creatures conquered and secure." 



THE RICH AND THE POOR. 



The rich and the poor meet together. The Lord is the maker of 
them all."— Proverbs xxii. 2. 

I TAKE it to be beyond all question true that there 
has been no time when the richer man and woman hood 
in this land has been so eager as it is now to make this 
true, that, because the Lord is the Maker of us all, those 
who are rich in fortune or endowment must do what 
lies in their power to lift their poorer brothers and sis- 
ters toward some better eminence than that on which 
they stand in the republic. 

A wise and good man, who rose to great eminence 
at the English bar, said, when he was far on in life, 
Every year I live shows me more clearly that we 
give far too poor a meaning to the word * brother,' 
and so fail in our true sympathy for the multitudes 
we call our fellow-citizens." And this is still true, 
no doubt, here and in my mother land. Many do not 
care to nourish such a sympathy, or look down on 
the poor with dislike and disdain ; while many more, 
who are eager to do what they can to bridge the chasm 
are at a loss how to begin. Still, much is done now, as 
it was never done before, for proof and prophecy. 

For as one of my small grandsons, just a mite of a boy, 
would draw himself up now and then to far more than 



196 



The Rich and the Poor 



his full stature by the measure of the man that lay 
within him, — and invite me to feel the bulge on his 
arm, the proof to his fond old grandsire of his desire 
to loom up as large as the pattern he saw in the mount, 
so, when we see this striving in the nobler manhood 
and womanhood of our land to grow up into Him who 
is our living head in this sympathy, that they may in- 
form and inspire their poorer brothers and sisters, and 
help them in all wise and gracious ways to come up 
higher, this is the proof and prophecy that we shall 
also grow up to *'the measure of the man," as the seer 
has it, — that is, of the angel/' 

This is the more welcome and good, again, to hear of 
and see, when we notice what a wide and true interpre- 
tation we are giving to this term "the poor," and what 
wise and true ways we are devising by which we may 
slip something of the wealth the well-endowed or the 
well-to-do possess into their life, so that they may rise 
to the fairer eminence in life and fortune. 

The time was with us, as it was with the world all 
about us, when we did not meet together, as the waters 
meet and blend to fill some great river, — the rich and the 
poor, — but were as the streams which flow onward, each 
in its own proper channel, and seek no alliance. Or 
the rich and the poor might be thrown together, as they 
must be, but it was very much as the icebergs are 
thrown together, when they drift down to the south- 
ward. 

They might be touched here and there in the kindly 
sun of this human sympathy, so that some cube from 
each would meet and blend ; but the solid substance 
of the bergs would abide as they were until they 



The Rich and the Poor 



197 



vanished in the sea of the eternal life. The poor in 
fortune, or in moral and mental endowment, so that 
they could not breast the tides like strong swimmers, 
but must drift back and forth like logs, to be thrown on 
the sand and rot or be burned, — as the stern old dogma 
ran, — this was the station in our life unto which they 
were called, — these poor; and with that they must be 
content, because it was the will of God concerning 
them, and was made good by the words of the Master 
and Lord : ''The poor ye have always with you." 

And so, when the sifted and right good seed began to 
grow down there to the eastward, and the great and 
holy truth the Master tells in his parable of the sower 
began to take shape and form in human lives, and some 
seed fell in the good ground to bring forth the forty, 
sixty, and a hundred fold, — some on the poor ledge, 
where there was no deepness ; some on the gross and 
unclean spaces, where the thorns sprang up and choked 
it; and some by the wayside, where it was presently de- 
voured, — great-hearted as many of them were in spots, 
the heart in them was not great enough to take home 
this truth, — that one hand lay behind all the sowing, 
the hand of the Lord and Maker of them all. 

And so there were God's poor among them, and then 
their own. Those who had no hope in their life, be- 
cause they were not men, but the frustrations of men, 
or men who did come to some poor and poverty-stricken 
earing of fivefold, shall we say, against the hundred in 
the rich, deep loam, — these were God's poor, or their 
own. 

But below these there was the low-down sowing, 
which had come up among the thorns and briars in the 



TJie Rich a7td the Poor 



sour haulms of our human life; and these, as we can 
easily see, were to them the devil's poor, for which they 
found it hard to say even the prayer of the good Scotch 
Calvinist of a later day : Lord, let them hang ower 
hell, but dinna let them fall in." They let them fall 
in, w^hatever He might do whose mercy endureth for- 
ever, and said their end was to be burned. 

This was the way we began with these poor down 
there where the main tap-root of our nation lies. The 
rich and the poor met together; but they did not meet 
and blend in a pure and true sympathy. The little 
band which landed on the rock was poor to the bare 
bone almost when it began to plant and build; while 
there were few rich who came westward ten years 
later, and so far, I suppose, it was one stream of ten- 
dency along the whole line of their life. Still, when 
the sowing began to grow together, toward the harvest, 
we begin to see the ever-growing distinction between 
the rich and the poor in the ordering of their life, and 
then between their own poor and those I have named 
once for all. 

They were instinctive democrats, or the most of 
them, in thought and purpose ; but the well-to-do were 
social and religious aristocrats, I think in quite an equal 
measure, from the merchants and selectmen, and the 
rest of a good degree, to the deacons and elders, and 
above them all the minister, in his towering pulpit, his 
wide-flowing wig, w^ith the Geneva gown and bands. 

These were the symbols of this separation between 
the rich and the poor down there, — the hundred-fold 
ears, the growth on the hungry ledge, and that among 
the thorns and briars. And so did some hapless man 



The Rich ajid the Poor 



199 



go all wrong, or some woman, like Hester in *'The 
Scarlet Letter," that matchless study of the old grim 
life, they burned the brand on them where it would 
stay through all time. 

They said every day, on their knees before the God 
and Father of us all, Forgive us our trespasses, as we 
forgive them that trespass against us"; but all the 
same they felt they must keep a record of those things 
they could not and would not forgive, though they 
might well spring from some sore and sad poverty 
of the moral nature, or some strong passion born of 
the evil we can so seldom trace in the heavy over- 
growth of the thorns and briars. 

It did not and, it is but fair to say, could not occur 
to this splendid manhood and womanhood to add to 
their virtue knowledge, and so ask whether the low, 
receding forehead, the weak and slack-twisted mouth 
and chin, the dangling hands, the shuffling feet, or the 
sensual mask might not stand for poverty where it may 
be most ruthless or hopeless, and say : Now let us bear 
with these poor, and slip some worth into their life out 
of the wealth He has given us in mind or moral worth 
or fortune, not because they are beggars, but brothers 
before the Lord and Maker of us all. Let us try to 
put ourselves in their place, and begin by getting 
down, in our sympathy for them, close to where they 
stand, that we may the better imderstand them, as 
He did who said, ' He that will be greatest among you, 
let him be the servant of all.'" 

They had noble and generous impulses, — these old 
Puritans who started the nation ; but we do not find 
this among them, — to seek and to save that which was 



200 



The Rich ojtd the Poor 



lost by reason of the bare, rugged ledge, the sour and 
weedy space where the drip was, or where there was 
nothing to get hold of worth the name by reason of 
the wayside scattering of the seed. 

They did maintain their churches noblv and well for 
those times, and got a schoolmaster there by the rock 
before they got a regular minister from across the sea, 
while the poor must not cry for bread with none to hear 
and help them. This is all true. 

But the picture of a later day is drawn from the life 
by the hand of genius, in which, as you will remember, 
the good and most capable house mother takes poor, 
shiftless Sam Lawson, the village blacksmith, to task, 
and gives him a good sound scolding; while the sham- 
bling fellow bears it the best he may, as he sees the 
Thanksgiving turkey bulge out in brave relief under 
her apron. 

Sam had to be about the man he was, one of God's 
poor; and once, when I met the peerless woman who 
has drawn his portrait with so many touches of tender 
relenting, I thanked her heartily for blending so deftly 
a ne'er-do-weel with the germ of the saint which may 
still be born in the line of the swarming household 
when every winter turns to spring for the poor ears up 
there on the ledge. 

He bears the good scolding tiie best he may, poor 
fellow ; but there is no humble heart in the good house- 
wife with the question, "Who made me and mine to 
differ, or how is it that we have the turkey to give, 
while he must take it with that blush, half of pleasure 
for the wife's sake and the children, and half of 
shame for his own?'' 



The Rich and the Poor 



201 



Not this question, and no invitation that they shall 
all come over and spend the day under the radiant roof- 
tree, so that, sitting down on equal terms as near as 
may be, Sam may perhaps win some touch of a proper 
pride, and say, *'Why, they treat us like their equals, 
and not as the rich toward the poor ; and so now I will 
try to do better, and, then, who knows whether some 
day they may not come to eat at our house in return." 
It was not to be done in this way or thought of, — the 
chasm was too wide. 

They were of the breed from which a true and clean 
democracy springs ; but they were aristocrats in the 
social order all the same, and could not help it. 

And the Majesty of England sent over men of rank 
and title to live with them and on their substance, but 
these were never a part of their more intimate life. 
That life lay with the people, and the people alone ; but 
it was this I would try to touch of the rich and the 
poor, whose life ran each in its own channel, and so 
you must be rich in land and beeves, in merchandise 
and money, or in talent or learning, before you could 
blend with the finer life, while, if you were of no ac- 
count, you must stay where you belonged. 

Now, I said, we have these still, and it may be in a 
larger average, to which the manhood of this finer and 
more gracious turn are only as yet what Matthew 
Arnold calls the remnant, men and women, who would 
not lower by a line the middle wall of partition between 
the rich and the poor, but would make it still higher 
and stronger, who can never begin to understand 
these poor, as we should all try to understand them, 
until they realize how much less of merit there is in 



202 



The Rich and the Poor 



their finer fortune or endowment than they imagine, 
and how much less of demerit there may be in those 
on whom they look down from their proud pre-emi- 
nence, or realize that what they have done for them- 
selves, who stand highest and have done best, is but 
the token of what He has done for them, who is the 
Lord and the Maker of us all, through generations of 
striving it may be, which are lost in the mists of time, 
while, if they could but scan the whole story as it 
stands, they might say by grace we are saved from 
being now am.ong these poorest, and it is not of our- 
selves, — it is the gift of God. 

Are such men as I glance at among the organizers 
and employers of labor ? The head does not say to the 
hands in this good fashion of sympathy, I need you 
just as surely as you need me ; and so, when the bell 
taps for each and all to go home, they move as far apart 
in this sympathy as Chippewa is from China. 

Or do w^e establish churches, who are of this type 
and temper, in his name who is the Maker of us all, and 
in his name who sat at meat with all sorts and condi- 
tions of men in the frankest and sweetest fashion ? 
What are these very often but clubs for the finer and 
selecter sort, while for the rest there are kitchen 
churches, shall I say, where we send the broken meats 
of the ministry, and expect them to be content and 
thrive ? 

Do these speak to the poor, their voice is a note or 
two higher than the tones they use to each other, or 
half an octave perhaps, than the scale they use for their 
equals ; and so it is with the whole finer life as it 
touches the poorer, who are not rated at what they are 



The Rich and the Poor 



203 



worth to God then, but at their worth to us, if there be 
any, as the greatest man we can name in his time set 
store on the simple old farmer, and loved now and 
then to be with him, but, as I make out, it was as 
when you open your heart to the saltness of the sea on 
a fair summer's day, or to the aromatic snap of the up- 
lands thick with wild roses and sweet fern. 

This is the old life come to its flowering; but, if this 
was all, we might well be alarmed, but it is not all. The 
better and nobler sympathy we find springing forth 
now is what I thank God for, which is bound to find 
great and gracious meanings in the words I have read. 

The real and true concern in so many whose fortune 
lies in wealth or endowment is to make their wealth a 
leaven which will lighten and sweeten the life below 
them. And I notice this now in my motherland as I 
never did before. 

There the employers who are wise in this wisdom of 
pure sympathy build sweet and fair homes for what they 
call their hands" and libraries and reading-rooms. 
They will go with them also, if they may now and then, 
on a day's holiday or have them come to the mansion 
or the park, and sit down with them at meat. 

They are touched by the beautiful contagion, and are 
trying to even things up a little more all the time, and 
be more nearly at one with their poorer brothers and 
sisters. Yet there is no man who sets more store on 
wealth and station than your Englishman ; and old 
Pepys does but speak for his order, when he writes in 
his diary, **This day I rode for the first time in my own 
carriage, at which I lifted my heart to God, and prayed 
him to continue it.*' 



204 



The Rich a?id the Poor 



Now you who came here first have done some grand 
things for those among us who must come after. You 
have thrown this goodly land open to the whole world, — 
excepting China, to our common shame, — so that the 
poorest man who comes here, if he can and will work, 
may begin at once to live better than he ever dreamed 
of living before, and win a good sure future for himself 
and his family. And with this you have given us all 
the rights of citizenship far ahead often of our power 
to use them well, making us all as rich in this endow- 
ment as the manhood is which has shed its blood on 
the battle-fields of two hundred and seventy years. 

So you have also created our common school system, 
built churches, hospitals, and asylums for the sick, the 
insane, the feeble, the aged, and the poor who have 
none to help them, and made no distinction worth nam- 
ing between the new-comer and the home-born man ; 
while these grand universities and libraries are spring- 
ing far and wide, to which we are all made welcome. 

I cannot tell the story, and need not, because we all 
know it, and know also that this grand lifting of our 
life from the lower toward the higher planes among 
those I think of is not done by the derrick, but from 
the breast. So we may well ask what we can do more 
than has been and is now being done, that the rich 
and the poor may meet together in a purer sympathy, 
because the Lord is the Maker of us all. 

I have but one answer to the question ; and it springs 
from the seed of God's grace in us all, if we will mind 
it, through which we shall all try to enter into the life 
and fortune of the poor who have no fortune, we can 
reckon in mind, body, or estate, as we have, and lend 



The Rich and the Poor 



205 



them a hand in which there is the pulse of a good 
human heart, see where we can meet them on the 
ground of our common human brotherhood ; and that's 
ail. 

Am I rich in fortune or in some finer wealth of birth 
and culture, I shall not be afraid, then, that my costly 
vase will suffer harm or loss by neighboring with the 
earthen pipkin. I shall remember that in all great 
houses there be divers vessels ; and the pan, brown or 
black, which will stand the fire and cook the dinner, 
shall be in no wise counted for dishonor, — no, not 
even against the vase which might adorn the palace of 
a king. 

I love to muse over the untold worth of a race, and 
am mighty proud of yours and mine. The yellow- 
haired, blue-eyed, great-limbed fellow who came storm- 
ing in from the northward once on a time, and took 
possession of about all he saw, he is of the manhood 
to which we belong, which has carried all before it so 
far in the long, stern fight for the first place among the 
nations. 

The eager desire to be as far up as we are was ream- 
ing in the blood ; and this whole upward march in two 
worlds has been on the line of our ambition and de- 
light. It was the gift of God ; and we must dree our 
splendid doom wherever we are, in England, Germany, 
in these States, and underneath the planet, in Australia. 

That is the law which lies within your life and mine. 
We are rich, while other races I could name are poor, 
who are blended with our life. But, if He who came to 
preach the gospel to the poor taught us one truth above 
another we must never forget, it was this of a real 



206 



The Rich and the Poor 



human brotherhood, founded on the holy truth that the 
Lord is not only the Maker, he is also the Father of us 
all. 

And this truth sank so deep into the hearts of those 
who were one with him in mind and purpose that it 
brought the infant Church and the cause it stood for into 
instant peril, when every man began to strip himself of 
the fruit of his endeavor, casting everything he possessed 
into the common treasury, and so opened for the most 
shiftless and worthless to share, and share alike, if they 
would only make up a poor and pious face, — which was 
all a mistake then as it is now, and far from His mind 
and purpose who said, **Ye have come for the loaves 
and fishes." 

This was what he did who came to seek and to save 
that which was lost. He came closest to those who 
were poorest, and most utterly lost, — the devil's poor, 
if you will ; and I may say that bad word again, — that 
he might pour into their forlorn natures some treasure 
from his own divine life, and so call out what was still 
divine in theirs. 

The devout Persian prays, O God, do something for 
the bad : thou hast done everything for the good in 
making them so good.'' He was here in God's stead, 
the dear Son of the All-Father, to minister to these 
poor with human hands, to reach them through this 
human sympathy which then became divine, to talk 
with them humanly and tenderly as man to man and 
man to woman, and to pour scorn and the wrath of the 
Lamb on those who stood so high above them, and were 
as hard in this human touch and sympathy for them as 
nails, counting the very alms they gave an investment 
which would return to their own proper profit. 



The Rich and the Poor 



2C7 



It is the beginning of the gospel of God to the poor 
in him who came to give sight to the blind, to restore 
the withered hand, to brace up the hapless will, to bid 
the lame walk, to command the evil spirit to come 
out, and to set at liberty them that were bound. Not 
to leave them in their isolation, but to make them feel 
there was one in this world who could not and would 
not let them go stumbling on in the dark, to bruise 
themselves on the flints which lie on the way of life 
for us all, but would by all means help them. ''There- 
fore, he who was rich for our sakes became poor, that 
we through his poverty might be made rich." 

So I will end where I began, with a note of joy over 
the signs and tokens of this sympathy of the rich 
toward the poor in the line of the holy Gospels, what- 
soever form it may take. It is proof and prophecy of 
the good time coming to me, — 

" When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps, 
But smit with freer light shall slowly melt 
In many streams to fatten lower lands, 
And light shall spread, and man be liker man 
Through all the seasons of the golden year.'' 

They told me once, when I went to Niagara, that, when 
they would bridge the great chasm, they sent a kite 
over first, and that drew a string. And the string drew 
a cable which held up a man, who got things started 
for the superb Suspension Bridge, which helps to clasp 
the continent together, and holds us all who see it in 
the spell of its beauty. And so, from these fine threads 
of human sympathy, these unwindings of the heart- 
strings and the purse-strings, these wings of a true and 



2o8 



TJie Rich and the Poor 



tender concern which take us across the chasm be- 
tween the rich and the poor, we can reach those who 
by nature or fortune have yet to be where they belong, 
and win them to believe that any true gospel to them 
stands, first of all, for the good human brotherhood ; 
and then this must follow, as the spring follows the 
winter. That those we can reach in this way will 
be touched by the truth that there is not only a 
better and nobler life waiting their striving and win- 
ning on the earth and in the heavens, but right friendly 
hearts to feel this sweet concern for them, with hands 
to clasp theirs and to hide holy meanings they could 
not dream of in those words as true as they are imper- 
ative, — 

*^ The rich and the poor meet together : 
The Lord is the Maker of them all." 



